Where to start?
> You are american you have a history and your parents have a history.
Parents have nothing to do with anything unless your parents cosign or add you as an authorized user on their cards. Being American has nothing to do with anything other than some cards require you to be a US citizen for some reason, my BVAA card does for example. My parents are scumbags and their scummy-iness doesn't effect my ability to build credit.
The trick is to apply for the right card, different lenders/products target different populations. A store card or a secured card is a good start in building credit, that's what I did when I was young and had practically zero income. My limit was like $300 but it was enough to get me on the map. I didn't have to deal with being rejected because I applied for the product that fits my life situation. If you just apply for the heavily advertised cards you are not going to get a good result. After that I applied for a crappy card I was "pre-approved" for that came in the mail. Once you have a credit history you're going to get offers in the mail unless you opt-out.
Getting a charge card (which is not the same as a credit card) may be an option too, not sure on that one.
>The question is not about your credit score but about getting the credit card to begin with. Once you get the card they assign you a credit score but in order to get it you have to start building debt (and as a foreigner I had to do that with my own money)
False, you don't have to have any debt to get a credit score. Having credit available to you you don't use is enough.
First you say
>You are asked about assets, income etc. but those things have very little effect on whether you get a credit card or not.
Then you say:
>I wasn't talking about credit history but about history as in, a customer in a bank for years. These are also factors for how easy/hard things like this is.... There is a difference between being a US citizen having had bank account most of your life and then being a foreigner who just got yours.
Those things are mutually exclusive and both can't be correct.
>There are plenty of other ways to credit companies could gauge inside your economic maturity as much of your financial history have been done via debit card for more or less the same transactions that you are going to use your credit card for... You are not suddenly going to become financially irresponsible just because you get credit
This is beyond false and laughable. Nobody gives two craps about "economic maturity" they want to know "is this person likely to pay back the loan?"
>Second it's a fairly know issue that the way creditscore is established is pretty flawed.
It has its limits but are you questioning actuaries that crunch these numbers for a living? I mean, I'm assuming they have a reason and numbers and there's data to back it up and they just didn't say "lol, lets make up some shit." If they were getting bad results and losing money they'd change the algorithm.
> I live in the US so yes I have a pretty good idea of how it works.
Almost no Americans have any idea how "the system" works, its very specificity knowledge and there's tons of myths. You know how many times I've heard people say "my credit is terrible, its around 750?" 750 is an excellent score. People get credit reports confused with credit scores and all kinds of "I heard," "I assume," etc.