Leave home without it: Credit card companies cancel on Muslim New Yorkers, by Hilary Russ, City Limits, May 2003. English language.
Say that you are one of those fortunate people who manage to pay off most of their credit cards every month. Then imagine your surprise when one of your cards is cancelled for no apparent reason. You’d be outraged, especially if you found out this was only happening to you and your friends.
That’s exactly what Farooq Firdous experienced. Last summer, Firdous, a Pakistani who got his green card in 1997 after 11 years of legal residence in the United States, received a phone call from an American Express representative regarding a credit card he held. The rep requested that he send the company a mountain of paperwork: three years of tax returns, six months of bank statements and a job verification letter.
His wife, Yasmin Khan, who is Indian, received a separate phone call that same day for her own AmEx credit card. In each case, the rep told them they had 15 days to submit the paperwork or their cards would be cancelled. Firdous and Khan called back later—twice—to ask reps if they could send the request in writing. They refused.
Firdous and Khan were confused, to say the least, because they always paid off their AmEx cards on time. After conferring with his wife, Firdous called the company back again. “I told them strictly, ‘You’re probably discriminating against minorities with Muslim names,’“ he recalls. He and his wife refused to submit the documentation, which on at least three different occasions company reps said they needed for “security reasons.”
A few weeks later, each received a letter saying his or her credit card was cancelled: “You did not provide the banking information, financial statements, income tax return, and/or identification documents requested.” The letters also stated that the reasons for cancelling the account included “information received from a consumer reporting agency,” hinting that credit problems might be to blame.
But Firdous’ credit is excellent, according to the credit report he subsequently obtained. (Indeed, after his AmEx card was cancelled, he immediately applied for and received a Citibank Mastercard.) The status of his closed AmEx account reads “Paid/Never late.”
The government’s post-September 11th infringementson civil liberties are well-documented and debated. But what happens when private companies take the fight against terrorism into their own hands? If you’re Pakistani, or Muslim, or both, you might just find your credit cards cancelled, despite the good credit you’ve worked hard to build.
City Limits has found 12 cases in which Muslims, nearly all Pakistani-Americans, with good credit, all of whom claim they made no unusual or exorbitant charges or late payments, had their American Express credit cards cancelled. We found no cases of non-Muslims’ credit cards being cancelled outright, or even non-Muslims who were asked to send in paperwork for existing accounts.
For Pakistanis in particular, losing access to financial services is neither simply the misfortune of discrimination, nor minor fallout from the U.S. war on terrorism. All over New York City, Pakistanis are proprietors of small businesses: medical practices, bodegas, restaurants and, in Firdous’ case, a computer store in Sheepshead Bay. For them, maintaining access to credit and other financial services is a matter of survival.
So Firdous was alarmed when he soon began hearing more stories like his. He had considered the AmEx matter a freak event—until he brought it up at a dinner party a couple of months later on Long Island. That’s when he and his wife realized they weren’t alone.
Two other guests at the table, Dr. Iqbal Siddiqui and his wife, Dr. Faizah Zuberi, who live in a stately home in New Jersey, had gone through almost exactly the same baffling series of events: Same request, same documents, same cancellation. And the same, immediate suspicion of discrimination. “They asked for too much stuff. I said, ‘Why are you asking all this? We have very good credit. There’s no need to do this,’“ says Siddiqui. “We are sympathetic Americans; we like America. They gave me bullshit on the phone.” Siddiqui and Zuberi recall reps telling them that they had been selected at random. The couple had used their AmEx almost exclusively to buy groceries at the local Costco.
After the dinner party, Firdous conducted his own informal survey. He discovered that American Express reps had contacted at least five more of his friends and acquaintances, requesting information for their existing American Express accounts. All of the friends’ cards were then cancelled, whether they sent in the paperwork or not. All are Muslim, while none of his Jewish or Chinese friends, he says, have received the dreaded call. “He was pretty angry about it,” recalls one American-born Chinese friend who did not want to be named.
Zuberi noticed the same trend, and even asked the AmEx representative, “‘How come I ask a lot of family members and friends and they say it all happened to them, but when I ask my American colleagues it hasn’t happened to them?’“ she recalls. “They say, ‘We have a lot of Joneses and Smiths on the list, too.’“ Zuberi wasn’t convinced.
American Express Vice President of Public Relations Tony Mitchell claims that company policy prohibits him from going into detail on Firdous’ or Khan’s specific cases, even though City Limits obtained their permission to do so. “We routinely monitor all of our card accounts,” Mitchell says. “As part of that, we may ask a card member for additional financial information to gain a fuller picture of the account and to assess the current credit and financial condition of the cardholder.”
This is an excerpt. To read the whole story, visit City Limit’s website at www.citylimits.org
