Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> Despite comprising 15.3 percent of the United States population, foreign-born residents remain structurally excluded from formal financial services — not because of financial irresponsibility but because their financial identities are non-portable across borders. This paper introduces the Portable Verified Financial Identity (PVFI) framework, which aggregates origin-country financial infrastructure quality, bilateral remittance corridor strength, and pre-arrival capital signals into a Pre-Arrival Banking and Financial Score (PABFS) that can be assigned to immigrants before any domestic credit history is established. Drawing on eight datasets — six federal surveys, two multilateral databases, and one proprietary dataset — covering more than 100 million observations (FDIC household surveys across three waves 2019–2023; IPUMS ACS 25.6 million persons; HMDA 68.4 million applications 2019–2023; FINRA NFCS 2021; SCF 2022; and KNOMAD remittance corridors covering 134 countries and $200.2 billion in annual flows), we document a persistent nativity gap in banking access of 2.7 to 3.6 percentage points and marked racial disparities in mortgage denial. Logistic regression on 481,917 matched foreign-born respondents confirms the core prediction: a one-standard-deviation increase in PVFI score is associated with a 12.7 percent reduction in low-income financial exclusion odds (OR = 0.873; 95% CI [0.866, 0.879]; p < 0.001). Machine learning validation on the Home Credit dataset shows that PVFI-analog external creditworthiness features improve credit model AUC by 7.6 percentage points for logistic regression and 6.6 points for gradient boosting. The results support a regulatory pathway for portable financial identity systems as instruments of immigrant financial inclusion. <bold>JEL Classification:</bold> G21, G28, J15, F24, G18, C55 </p>