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Jewish World Review April 12, 2005 / 3 Nisan , 5765 Illegal immigrants and Social Security By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If Americans ever succeeded in getting rid of illegal immigrants — deporting those who are already here and preventing the entry of others — there would be an outcry from Latino activists, civil libertarians and the business community.
But that's nothing. Do you know who might really be furious? The Social Security Administration. If not for the billions in payroll taxes that illegal immigrants are paying into the system, the funding crisis facing Social Security would be much more serious and much more imminent. It is all thanks to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made it a crime for employers to knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
True, the law is a joke that is rarely enforced, and that should bother the law-and-order crowd more than it does. But by forcing employers to require Social Security cards — even bogus ones — IRCA did manage to rope illegal immigrants into the system. Last year, contributions by illegal immigrants made up about 10 percent of the Social Security surplus — the difference between what the system takes in and what it doles out.
According to a recent story in The New York Times, the numbers are startling. But they help explain why the U.S. government has tolerated illegal immigration for so long. It's the same reason that someone visiting Las Vegas tolerates a slot machine spewing out silver dollars.
Here's the drill: People enter the country illegally, promptly procure bogus Social Security cards from the black market, and use them to get jobs. Eventually they get paid, and those earnings generate W-2s that go to the Social Security Administration, which tucks them away in something called the "earnings suspense file." (The government does try to notify some of the larger employers that Social Security cards they've accepted appear to be phony, but that's about the extent of its efforts to figure out where all this money is coming from.) According to the best estimates of the Social Security Administration, the fund has kept track over the last 20 years of more than $300 billion in total earnings — the vast majority of them attributable to illegal immigrants.
Three-hundred billion dollars! You have to admit that's pretty impressive in a country where no one will admit to actually hiring illegal immigrants in the first place.
But those are just the figures in a ledger. The hard currency is the Social Security taxes that illegal immigrants and their employers pay on those earnings. That rings in at about $7 billion a year. Which is why you don't hear the Social Security Administration raising a fuss over illegal immigration. And to the degree that this arm of the U.S. government has friends in Congress, it could explain why you don't see many pieces of legislation calling for mass deportations of illegal immigrants. I mean, why kill the golden goose?
There is a whole separate discussion about what we should do with this money. Some would use the funds to reimburse local schools and hospitals for services they provide to illegal immigrants. President Bush has the best idea: We should leave the money alone. Why? Well, simply put: Because it's not ours. It belongs to the people who earned it, even if they earned it using fake documents. After all, the fact that the documents were phony didn't stop the employer — the homebuilder, farmer or whatever — from using the labor at what was presumably an inexpensive rate so that he could profit. Why shouldn't workers profit from their own labor to the greatest degree possible?
And so perhaps the most promising element of President Bush's plan to reform the immigration system is his idea to, from this point forward, create 401(k)-type accounts where Mexican immigrant workers could invest part of their earnings. There the money would sit until the workers returned to Mexico, at which point they could draw it out. Bush's plan would put an end to the current system, and that's what hard-line conservatives hate about it. They're basically admitting that Social Security needs to rely on ill-gotten goods just to stay afloat.
It's amazing. Some of the same people who are constantly complaining about how illegal immigrants are the ruin of the civilization, including some Republicans in Congress, have no more qualms about letting them continue to prop up Social Security.
And people wonder why we have so much illegal immigration. Not me. I wonder why we don't have more of it.
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
