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- Hacker News
- I wonder how much this will drive adoption of crypto for remittances.by thinkcontext
- I don’t see how. Their problem is they have cash and want to turn it into something else. The law criminalizes that transaction without reporting.by lokar
- Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission. It is a fundamental purpose of money. To deny this purpose puts the validity of particular money into question. Putting up fences results in a very high rate of false positives. No wonder people use crypto as they should.
If you want to go after cartels, then actually go after cartels. That's not what they're doing.
by OutOfHere - Everybody here falls for the most obvious bait.by Nicook
- > Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
This ignores that taxes are a thing that need enforcement. Its like saying basic necessities should be free, the world should be without pollution, or cancer shouldn't exist.
by BobbyJo - Money laundering is about hiding illegal actions by faking the source of the money.
Generally speaking, it makes sense to me that a society wants to make that difficult.
by bulbar - > Money laundering is an absurd concept. People should be free to transfer money to whoever they like, without permission.
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other obviously illegal stuff he was doing. I don't know the details, but I imagine it was because he put in effort to create an organization that made it difficult-to-impossible for the law-abiding feds to go after him directly. That's why it's important to also prohibit the ancillary activities of crime.
And money laundering isn't an absurd concept, it just means it's additionally illegal to conceal the origin of illicit income.
If you want to get all dogmatic against stuff like laws against money laundering, come up with an effective alternative. Otherwise those laws aren't going anywhere and few will care about your objections, because they're unreasonable.
by palmotea - I forget where I read this but I agree that if you want to know the real reason for a government policy, look at the effect is has.
It's pretty obvious what they're doing.
by altern8 - This is just the classic "we're going to crack down, but even harder!".
It's just the behavior of people who have no new ideas for how to solve a problem.
by nitwit005 - So there is no such thing as unintended consequences? Everything always works to the master plan?by mhurron
- by kej
- My question is , why don't these people have bank accounts?by Krypto26
- They systemically lock people out of banking, home ownership, employment, running a business, selling their products, getting famous, and so-on.
There's a class of people that has to have "more" than the rest. And they do that by controlling access to everything. They spend tons of money on distractions and concepts like moneylending which makes everyone have to go through the "loan" and "approval" process - of course only some people get approved lol So nobody else gets a house!
Instead of trying to become better themselves and make new discoveries, and build genuine wealth they can give back, the gatekeeping/inheritance mindset is to stop others who are trying to better themselves. To knock them back. It doesn't stop at preventing others from attaining wealth and status, they don't even want you to have a roof over your head.
If they had it their way, you wouldn't have a bank, house, car, and barely any money. You'd be wearing some goofy uniform working for them living in poverty.
by bluemoonx - Because then you’d have to pay taxesby dilyevsky
- Economists keep track of the number of "unbanked" people. At the lower end of the spectrum the % of "unbanked" individuals is quite high and they live almost exclusively in an all-cash economy. Particularly in immigrant communities. There are a number of problems with being "unbanked", in particular if your house is burglarized you can lose your entire life savings, and you have little to no access to formal credit, which in the US at least, is the primary path to accruing wealth or at least savings.by hadlock
- > With the changes, people became reluctant to make these transactions, Ornelas said, because they worry it will open them up for government surveillance or targeting by immigration authorities in the current intensified enforcement.
Presumably, because it's hard to get a bank account in a country you aren't supposed to be in.
by nitwit005 - Depends. Why can't banks offer more debit cards to more people and, I don't know, stop honoring overdrafts? Transactions should decline, not overdraft, even with overdraft off.
We've built lots of traps for people that have balances near-zero that keep them near zero, and one little mistake snowballs into blacklists from Telecheck, ChexSystems, and other fun companies.
Meanwhile once you can keep your balance with at least three significant zeros in it, the bank will be happy to shower you back in rewards and cashback, ripped away from the fees and interest levied to the poor.
by kotaKat - This article is repeating a transparently false framing as the truth. This wasn't a law about cartel money laundering, which doesn't happen near the border anyway. Money laundering at scale happens in the global market and always has.
The clear purpose of the regulation was exactly the "side effect" detailed in the article: hurting immigrant communities that maintain ties across the border. And it worked. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.
by ajross - The belief that all the people you yourselves elected are lying all the time and openly out to get you is such an uniquely Gringo idea it's entirely possible the migrants in this community, like the one showcased in the article, mistakenly took the racists' word at face value.
Retrospectively, looking at the various kinds of concentration camps set up all over the country, that might have been a bad choice to make. But that doesn't make it a less reasonable one at the time.
- Its a particularly galling policy for disproportionately hurting small businesses given the number of money laundering, sanctions avoidance, etc big fish Trump has pardoned, ended investigations and enforcement generally.by thinkcontext
- The issue is that it wasn't "clear" to sufficient people. Too many people believe at face value the claims. Some of them honestly believe the face value claims.by abfan1127
- It surprises me how much Americans don't understand how deeply the cartel is in every transaction. Yes, sending money to Grandma to pay for a car is funding the cartel who probably got paid to make the car available. Grandma may even pay small direct bribes to the cartel just to be able to live her life.
Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution) or we can make Mexico a safe and excellent country again, and that means getting rid of the cartel.
And yes, other countries have their issues too and we should help stabilize those countries as well.
If the Mexican government can fix their cartel issue, we can go back to normal remittances. Until then the US will make policy choices to resolve problems.
As always, the salt of the earth people will pay the cost for politicians being bad at things.
by vorpalhex - >Either all of Mexico can move to the US (probably not a winning solution)
Indeed, it is not.
But not for lack of trying. The biggest migration in history is the 10% of Mexico that has moved to the US since 1970. <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1trqnn8/he...>
As of 2024, 11 million Mexican-born people live in the US. <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>
by TMWNN - I think it's possible, but pretty difficult. There's just too much money to be made selling drugs to the US.by wombat-man
- > that means getting rid of the cartel.
Stop Americans buying drugs from them. Even invading Mexico won't get rid of the cartels.
by triceratops - A safe and prosperous Mexico would be a huge advantage to America. We should be investing a lot more into this.by lokar
- What you're suggesting is that all Mexicans suffer more because some money may somehow end up in the hands of the cartel. And that, for some reason, the US should help do this. That's absurd.
If you really want to eliminate the cartels make recreational drugs legal.
by driverdan - > a violation of the fourth amendment that protects the rights of people against unreasonable searches and seizures
So there exist juridical interpretations that call monitoring low value money transfer «unreasonable searches and seizures»? This is immensely interesting. Does anyone have further info?
by mdp2021 - One might as well say "the surgeon tried to cut out the cancer; took out some healthy tissue". Yeah, that's how it goes. The existence of side effects is not convincing as a reason not to do things. The objective is to get results while minimizing undesirable side effects, but the desirable amount of side effects is not zero.by arjie
- What if you don't get results while not doing much of minimizing? And no, the "desirable" amount is zeroby eviks