re: 39 year old husband and father ripped from his family on MLK day

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How could he apply for citizenship when he was brought here by an undocumented as a child?

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Do the Republicans REALLY want stories like this to play out in a media a million times this year?

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I've already answered that. I've never thought of you as having any knowledge of politics or any other issue brought up on this board, so I'll give you a pass.

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It works like this: Many immigrants who aren’t authorized to work in the United States buy fake Social Security cards and present them to their employers, who either don’t know they are fake or don’t look too closely. When the employer submits a W-2 form and a tax payment on those workers’ behalf to the Social Security Administration, the federal government holds onto those payroll taxes, even if the Social Security number isn’t linked to anyone on file. And then, a large chunk of that money ends up in the Social Security trust funds, from which retirement benefits are doled out to aging Americans.

The Social Security system has grown increasingly reliant on this stream of revenue, particularly as aging Baby Boomers start to retire. Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, estimates that about 1.8 million immigrants were working with fake or stolen Social Security cards in 2010, and he expects that number to reach 3.4 million by 2040. He calculates that undocumented immigrants paid $13 billion into the retirement trust fund that year, and only got about $1 billion in benefits. “We estimate that earnings by unauthorized immigrants result in a net positive effect on Social Security financial status generally, and that this effect contributed roughly $12 billion to the cash flow of the program for 2010,” Gross concluded in a 2013 review of the impact of undocumented immigrants on Social Security.

Ironically, it was a piece of legislation aimed at curbing the hiring of undocumented immigrants that created this steady source of revenue for the Social Security system. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act set penalties for employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants. It was the first time the federal government had made it a crime to employ undocumented workers. Yet instead of destroying the underground labor market, this new law just made it more sophisticated, producing a thriving market for fake U.S. birth certificates, IDs and social security cards, which undocumented workers presented to their employers when asked for their papers. Undocumented workers started filling out W-2 forms, and the federal government began receiving and holding onto payroll taxes, even though the fake social security numbers didn’t match anyone in the system. The Social Security Administration sends no-match letters to employers to alert them of the problem and urge them to resolve it.

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