Cry me a river ... just don't cross it

The following are excerpts from an April 5, 2005 article by Eduardo Porter. The blue text is my own commentary. 

Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions Payback’s a Bitch
Since illegally crossing the Mexican border into the United States six years ago, Ángel Martínez has done backbreaking work, harvesting asparagus, pruning grapevines and picking the ripe fruit. More recently, he has also washed trucks, often working as much as 70 hours a week, earning $8.50 to $12.75 an hour. My heart’s breaking for the guy. That’s about $45,000 a year … more than the average legal American family earns.

Last year, Mr. Martínez paid about $2,000 toward Social Security and $450 for Medicare through payroll taxes withheld from his wages. Yet unlike most Americans, who will receive some form of a public pension in retirement and will be eligible for Medicare as soon as they turn 65, Mr. Martínez is not entitled to benefits. Yeah, so what? What part of “illegal immigrant” is he failing to understand?

He belongs to a big club. As the debate over Social Security heats up, the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year. Makes up a little bit for the free healthcare and education they’re pawning off our country.

IRCA, as the immigration act is known, did little to deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants or to discourage them from working. But for Social Security's finances, it was a great piece of legislation. One would think the libs would consider this a win-win situation: the illegals get to work and Social Security gets padded. Why are they still whining?
Starting in the late 1980's, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect - sometimes simply fictitious - Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to. Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.

"Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes," said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration. "Other-than-legal”?! Why does the liberal contingency have such a hard time saying it correctly: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT. Emphasis on "illegal".

Using data from the Census Bureau's current population survey, Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, estimated that 3.8 million households headed by illegal immigrants generated $6.4 billion in Social Security taxes in 2002. A comparative handful of former illegal immigrant workers who have obtained legal residence have been able to accredit their previous earnings to their new legal Social Security numbers. And yet those same libs who helped them get this money are the ones whining because Grandpa doesn’t get enough to pay his medical expenses. Mr. Camarota is among those opposed to granting a broad amnesty to illegal immigrants, arguing that, among other things, they might claim Social Security benefits and put further financial stress on the system. Finally, a voice of reason!

Yet to immigrants, the lack of retirement benefits is just part of the package of hardship they took on when they decided to make the trek north. Hand me a hankie, I’m sobbing my eyes out for them.

Mario Avalos, a naturalized Nicaraguan immigrant who prepares income tax returns for many workers in the area, including immigrants without legal papers, observes that many older workers return home to Mexico. Taking tax free American dollars with them. "Among my clients," he said, "I can't recall anybody over 60 without papers.

No doubt most illegal immigrants would prefer to avoid Social Security altogether. Yeah, well so would most legal residents. As part of its efforts to properly assign the growing pile of unassigned wages, Social Security sends about 130,000 letters a year to employers with large numbers of mismatched pay statements. Though not an intended consequence of these so-called no-match letters, in many cases employers who get them dismiss the workers affected. Or the workers - fearing that immigration authorities might be on their trail - just leave. Don’t you just hate it when the law catches up with you?

Last February, for instance, discrepancies in Social Security numbers put an end to the job of Minerva Ortega, 25, from Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, who worked in the cheese department at a warehouse for Mike Campbell & Associates, a distributor for Trader Joe's, a popular discount food retailer with a large operation in California. Gasp -- illegals in California?! Who would have guessed!

The company asked dozens of workers to prove that they had cleared up or were in the process of clearing up the "discrepancy between the information on our payroll related to your employment and the S.S.A.'s records." Most could not. Ms. Ortega said about 150 workers lost their jobs. In a statement, Mike Campbell said that it did not fire any of the workers, but Robert Camarena, a company official, acknowledged that many left. The good news is that they can’t file for unemployment … yet.

Ms. Ortega is now looking for work again. She does not want to go back to the fields, so she is holding out for a better-paid factory job. A job that should really go to a legal citizen. Whatever work she finds, though, she intends to go on the payroll with the same Social Security number she has now, a number that will not jibe with federal records. With this number, she will continue paying taxes. At last, a positive twist to her sob story. Last year she paid about $1,200 in Social Security taxes, matched by her employer, on an income of $19,000. She will never see the money again, she realizes, but at least she will have a job in the United States.

"I don't pay much attention," Ms. Ortega said. "I know I don't get any benefit." Wrong. You get the benefit of living in the US without having to take on the responsibilities that go with it. No pity here.