Part 5: Businesses meet immigrants' needs

Illegal immigrants can qualify for mortgage loans, buy health insurance, set up checking accounts, check out library books and make monthly payments on kitchen appliances.

They can sign up for phone and satellite-television service. Most of all, they purchase goods, to the tune of nearly $5 billion a year in North Carolina.

Companies of all sizes are waking up to this new, legal and largely untapped business opportunity.

In North Carolina, where the illegal immigrant population is climbing toward a half-million, businesses are tailoring their products and tweaking their policies to reach the newcomers.

Not surprisingly, their marketing focuses on consumers from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia and other Latin American countries. Hispanics account for more than half of all foreign-born residents in the state.

"I know of few businesses in North Carolina or anywhere in the U.S. who can afford to turn their backs on such a lucrative target market -- undocumented or not," said Nicholas Didow, an associate professor of marketing at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Along with retirees and baby boomers, Hispanic consumers have become the fastest-growing market segment in the state's economy, he said.

Many have been in the state a decade or longer, and now they're ready to pursue their own American dream: Start a small business, buy a home, watch the children grow up.

Corporate America is busily responding by tweaking policies and creating special programs to serve immigrants and their families.

Bank of America, the nation's largest consumer bank, regularly opens accounts for Mexican immigrants who lack a Social Security card but can provide an identification card issued by Mexican consulates, known as a matr'cula consular. A number of banks accept the card to qualify illegal immigrants for bank services they were barred from just a few years ago.

The consulate in Raleigh issued 23,553 matr'culas last year, 30 percent more than two years earlier. Most people who apply for the card are illegal immigrants, said Karla Ornelas, the consulate's deputy counsel.

The number of cards issued dropped to 18,350 in 2005 after the consulate implemented new technology, but Ornelas said she expects well over 23,000 matr'culas to be produced this year.

Another form of identification that is replacing the Social Security card -- the prized document that illegal immigrants cannot legally obtain -- is the Individual Tax Identification Number.

The IRS requires people who work in the United States to pay taxes, and has created individual tax numbers to collect from illegal immigrants, foreign students, visiting professionals and others who lack Social Security numbers. Since the system was created in 1996, the government has issued 9.2 million to workers nationwide.

By accepting matr'culas or tax ID numbers, Bank of America is not trying to legitimize people who enter the country illegally, said Marcos Rosenberg, a senior vice president and multicultural marketing executive at the bank's headquarters in Charlotte. Nor, he noted, does the bank violate any state or federal laws.

And that's good for Bank of America and other financial institutions that want a share of the largest community in the nation not served by banks. Surveys have shown that more than one-third of the 40-million-strong Hispanic community in the United States lacks bank accounts.

In 2005, Bank of America opened more than 1 million checking accounts for Hispanic customers, Rosenberg said, equivalent to the customer growth of a big Latin American bank. "That's a tremendous opportunity," he said.