How illegal immigrants are helping Social Security

[getthefacts]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/02/AR2010090202673.html

How illegal immigrants are helping Social Security

By Edward Schumacher-Matos
Friday, September 3, 2010;

The contributions by unauthorized immigrants to Social Security -- essentially, to the retirement income of everyday Americans -- are much larger than previously known, raising questions about the efforts in many states and among Republicans in Congress to force these workers out.

In response to a research inquiry for a book I am writing on the economics of immigration, Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and someone who enjoys bipartisan support for his straightforwardness, said that by 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of somewhere between $120 billion and $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants.

That represented an astounding 5.4 percent to 10.7 percent of the trust fund's total assets of $2.24 trillion that year. The cumulative contribution is surely higher now. Unauthorized immigrants paid a net contribution of $12 billion in 2007 alone, Goss said.

Previous estimates circulating publicly and in Congress had placed the annual contributions at roughly half of Goss's 2007 figure and listed the cumulative benefit on the order of $50 billion.

The Social Security trust fund faces a solvency crisis that would be even more pressing were it not for these payments.

"If for example we had not had other-than-legal immigrants in the country over the past," Goss e-mailed me, "then these numbers suggest that we would have entered persistent shortfall of tax revenue to cover starting 2009, or six years earlier than estimated under the 2010 Trustees Report."

Americans are faced with the difficult choice of cutting pensions, delaying the retirement age or raising taxes if we want to maintain the solvency of what has been the centerpiece of social welfare for ordinary Americans since the 1930s.

Legal immigrants are also net contributors to the pensions of the rest of us because they are relatively young as a group. But the benefit we receive from unauthorized immigrants carries special irony. Immigration restrictionists in Arizona, Virginia, Texas and almost every state in the country are pushing bills and local ordinances to force them out by making it difficult to get jobs, rent apartments, send their children to college or drive cars.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimated this week that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the country dropped from a peak of 12 million in March 2007 to 11.1 million in March 2009. The drop is due in part to the recession but also to the hostile atmosphere toward unauthorized immigrants.

The Obama administration isn't helping much. Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, favors legalizing most of the unauthorized. But in making enforcement systems tighter to curtail future illegal immigration, his administration is deporting ever more of the ones already here -- to the tune of 400,000 this year. Yet the administration has resisted pressuring congressional Democrats to craft a legalization bill, in part because of Republican opposition.

Adding to the Social Security irony is that the restrictionists are mostly older or retired whites from longtime American families. The very people, in other words, who benefit most from the Social Security payments by unauthorized immigrants.

The Social Security actuaries estimate that two-thirds of unauthorized immigrant workers, or 5.6 million people, were paying into the system in 2007. Roughly half used a Social Security number tied to an invented name or one that belonged to someone else. Of the rest, many got legal cards when they entered the country under a temporary work visa. They stayed illegally after their visas expired.

About 180,000 unauthorized immigrants received about $1 billion in fraudulent benefits in 2007, Goss said. These benefits are subtracted from the net contribution. Few of the unauthorized workers are likely to receive anything, ever. About the only way they might would be if they were to become legal, and they had paid their withholding taxes using their true names.

The decline in illegal immigration, plus tighter workplace enforcement, means that contributions from the unauthorized will decrease. But as Goss notes, they remain, because of larger families, a positive contributing factor to Social Security solvency.

Somebody ought to say thank you.

[DonCoquixote]

1. but oh no

People hate immigrants. Not that the rich will not bring them in, but after people get done demonizing them, they can enjoy their new jobs picking cotton and tomatoes, for dirt poor wages, just like the rich here have paid since slavery.

[Hello_Kitty]

2. It's wage theft. Pure and simple. eom

[bemildred]

3. Shhhh! Don't upset the Teatards. nt

[dkf]

4. That didn't help the solvency of SS. It helped the rich get away with lower tax rates is all.

Oh the irony.

[sabrina 1]

5. We can change that by raising taxes on the rich regardless of

Social Security. If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, if we legalized undocumented workers, raise the benefits of those now receiving them and cut the Pentagon budget that would take care of the deficit and increase the Trust fund. SS would be solvent and with a surplus for the next 75 years or more.

One more thing, a law needs to be passed that forbids the Federal Government from borrowing from SS. They need to forget that this fund exists. It doesn't belong to them, it belongs to us.

It's time for the wealty to start pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and make some sacrifices like everyone else. Starting with ending the wars games they have been playing that have cost this country billions of dollars and worse, so many lives.

[dkf]

6. Personally I do t think there will be enough jobs for Americans much less the illegal immigrants.

I see high unemployment as a long term problem.

[sabrina 1]

7. That can be changed by doing what is necessary. Stop bailing

out failed corporate institutions and start a huge jobs program with that money. Stopping the Bush tax cuts and rewarding big Corps that keep jobs in this country, would help towards bringing back some of those jobs that were handed over to foreign countries.

Fixing the infrastructure in this country alone could provide jobs for millions of workers currently unemployed. And moving quickly to research and development of alternative energy sources, which is going to have to happen anyhow, would provide more jobs to millions of people now and into the future.

I do not see unemployment as a long term problem. The only reason it is, is because the focus has been on bailing out Wall St. rather than Main St. That was bound to produce unemployment.