Declaring immigrants dead: More senseless cruelty from the regime

Trump Regime ignores contributions by undocumented workers as it schemes ways to ramp up deportations.

Immigrant cemetery, Bethune Colorado (Robert Adams photo, 1937)

Included on the long list of senseless action items from the Trump Regime — items that are more about fear-mongering and cruelty than anything rational and productive — is the whole approach to undocumented immigrants.

The latest news on this front, reported by The New York Times and Washington Post, is that the administration wants the Social Security Administration to list thousands of migrants who came into the country legally during the Biden administration as officially dead, ostensibly to make life here financially impossible for them so they will self-deport.

The Trump Regime wants America to believe that the nation has been invaded by thousands of criminals and terrorists and that they need to be deported en masse — and without due process, if possible.

Like many Americans, I don’t believe a word that comes from Trump’s mouth or from any of his surrogates. Given the regime’s track record, just since January 20, why should we believe anything they say about the threats posed by undocumented immigrants?

Instead of working with Congress to fix the broken immigration system — better border security and amnesty for law-abiding immigrants with a history of work — we have a cruel, draconian approach fashioned by Stephen Miller, the racist architect of family separation, the Muslim ban and efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Miller is the grand schemer behind what Trump has promised: “the largest deportation program in American history.”

Aside from the racist and cruel nature of all this, there’s the part that makes no sense: The Trump Regime is trying to undertake a sweeping purge of undocumented workers at a time when we have a labor shortage reported in many sectors of the economy — agriculture for one.

And here’s the other part: Undocumented immigrants work and pay taxes. A lot of Americans are still surprised to hear this but it has been documented repeatedly over the years.

Here’s some history:

A few million undocumented workers have an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from the Internal Revenue Service. The ITINs, in lieu of Social Security numbers, have been available since the 1990s. (As of January 2021, there were an estimated 5.4 million active ITINs, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.)

With ITINs, workers pay Social Security taxes through payroll deductions and they can use the numbers to file federal and state income taxes.

Since ITINs were first made available in 1996, the vast majority have been snapped up by undocumented immigrants, and it was explained to me long ago — by a person who worked with immigrants in Maryland and Virginia — that many of them wanted to establish a record of paying taxes should one day they be eligible for amnesty and a path to U.S. citizenship. (See Reagan amnesty, 1988.)

In 2001, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan estimated that undocumented immigrants paid about $70 billion annually in taxes and received about $43 billion in government services — a net benefit to American taxpayers that smashed one of the common myths still proliferated by Trump.

In 2005, The Times reported that undocumented workers contributed about $7 billion to the Social Security Administration.

By 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of upwards of $240 billion from “unauthorized immigrants” over several years.

In 2010, Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the SSA, said: “If we had not had other-than-legal immigrants in the country, these numbers suggest that we would have entered a persistent shortfall of tax revenue to cover [payouts] starting [in] 2009.”

And there’s been more revenue from undocumented workers since then.

“An estimated 11 million immigrants live in the U.S. without authorization,” says the Tax Policy Center. “Contrary to some claims, they pay a considerable amount in taxes. Some estimates suggest undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.”

The nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in 2022.

In 40 states, ITEP found, undocumented immigrants “pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1 percent of households living within their borders.”

There was a time when we bragged about and celebrated the fact that so many of the world’s poor and oppressed wanted to come here. In the past two decades, this whole matter has been politicized, and undocumented workers demonized, by right-wing politicians who exploit fears and prejudices.

But aside from Trump/MAGA hard-liners, the reactionary talk-show crowd and various bigots, most Americans are not so strident about all this. We do not see the vast majority of foreigners trying to make a life here as threats to our democracy. We don’t want open borders; we want a better organized, more secure immigration system. Most of us do not see 11 million deportations as plausible or even desirable, given the country’s labor needs.

One more thing about this: Millions of undocumented workers, if they leave of their own will or through deportation, will never collect retirement or health benefits from the federal government. They’ve supported us in many ways — harvesting the food we eat, building our homes and highways, caring for seniors, mulching our shrubbery, and contributing to our government retirement funds.

The Trump Regime’s approach is cruel. It also makes no sense.

Cruel and senseless — that’s pretty much the 47th presidency.