Obama’s Amnesty Will Loot Social Security To Give Your Money To Illegal Aliens
One of the issues that killed the Senate’s hated “Gang of Eight” amnesty for illegal aliens bill was that it allowed the amnestied illegal aliens to immediately access public benefits reserved for citizens and legal immigrants.
House conservatives correctly argued that the “Gang of Eight” bill and its various House companion bills would allow illegal aliens immediate access to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and various other welfare programs, such as food stamps.
While the proponents of the “Gang of Eight” bill tried to finesse the issue the bottom line was and is that once the government gives a Social Security number and card to an illegal alien that opens up a whole smorgasbord of federal, state and local benefits – and it also opens up the possibility of registering to vote.
Now the Federation of American Immigration Reform has produced a stunning report that details how Obama’s planned illegal “executive amnesty” will provide the same free ride that the “Gang of Eight” bill did.
“Obama’s executive amnesty isn’t only unconstitutional but costly; from day one it opens up federal and state benefits to individuals who are still illegal aliens, regardless of the label the President puts on them,” FAIR executive director Julie Kirchner told Matt Boyle of Breitbart News in an exclusive interview in advance of the report’s public release.
The seven-page report from FAIR details how either of the two major mechanisms through which Obama would grant the executive amnesty to millions of illegal aliens would ultimately end up with those millions of illegal aliens taking U.S. taxpayer benefits away from struggling Americans almost immediately.
Obama could give the millions of illegal aliens “humanitarian parole,” something the FAIR report notes is included in statute as a power of the executive branch under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) for “temporary” protections for people from outside the United States. But the Bill Clinton administration in 1998, via a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo, expanded the meaning of “humanitarian parole” to illegal aliens inside the U.S. That memo did not have any “statutory or regulatory basis,” FAIR wrote, but Obama has used it to grant “parole in place to illegal aliens and is expected to expand this practice.”
If that’s how Obama grants executive amnesty to the millions of illegal aliens he plans to, they’ll get near-immediate access to welfare and other public benefits.
“Aliens with parole generally receive work authorization and are eligible for most benefits under federal law,” FAIR wrote. “This is true regardless of whether they have humanitarian parole or parole in place because the eligibility rules for benefits programs make no distinction between the two. Indeed, the longer an alien’s parole, the more benefits he is eligible to receive.”
As for unemployment benefits, aliens with parole for less than a year are also eligible for those despite the fact that states administer unemployment benefits. That’s because state unemployment benefits are “based upon the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA), which specifically says that aliens paroled into the U.S. for less than one year are eligible for unemployment benefits provided they otherwise meet the program’s other requirements.”
Such aliens who would get parole would also get immediate access to Social Security and Medicare benefits—meaning they could take Social Security or Medicare away from Americans—FAIR wrote, “so long as they meet other eligibility requirements.”
“By statute, Congress exempted retirement benefits under Social Security from the list of federal public benefits for which an alien must be a ‘qualified alien’ and wait five years for eligibility pursuant to PRWORA,” FAIR wrote. “Instead the Social Security Act only requires that aliens be ‘lawfully present.’ The regulation that defines ‘lawfully present’ for retirement benefits includes aliens paroled into the U.S. for less than one year.”
As for Medicare, the laws and regulations are similar to Social Security—meaning illegal aliens who would get parole status under an Obama amnesty would have almost immediate access to Medicare.
Now here’s what no one on Capitol Hill is talking about, but every Republican and those few Democrats who still actually care about working Americans instead of ethic power politics should care about – adding that many recipients will break Social Security, and the federal budget, almost immediately.
Social Security and Medicare together accounted for 41 percent of Federal expenditures in fiscal year 2013.
According to the Social Security Trustees’ 2014 Annual Report, Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010 and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period.
The federal deficit for Fiscal Year 2014 is $483.35 billion.
Now here’s the kicker: The Trustees project that this annual cash-flow deficit will average about $77 billion between 2014 and 2018 before rising steeply as income growth slows to its sustainable trend rate after the economic recovery is complete while the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.
What that means is that the United States is borrowing $77 billion, mostly from the Chinese, to pay benefits to its citizens.
Last year, The Heritage Foundation issued a report estimating the combined 75-year unfunded obligation of the Social Security and Disability trust funds (referred to as the OASDI trust fund) is $12.3 trillion. This is a $1 trillion increase from the previous year’s unfunded obligation of $11.3 trillion.
The combined Social Security and Disability programs are projected to remain solvent—that is, they are expected to have enough revenue from payroll taxes, interest on the trust fund balance, and repayment of borrowed trust fund dollars to pay out scheduled benefits—through 2033.
Heritage noted that if no action is taken to improve the program’s solvency before 2033, benefits will be reduced across the board by 23 percent.
In 2033, the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted, and the program will be able to pay only three-fourths of scheduled benefits.
While the Social Security system is considered solvent until that year, what is the effect of adding as many as 11 million illegal aliens to the Social Security beneficiary pool?
Economics 101 tells us the first illegal aliens to seek amnesty will be the illegal aliens who seek benefits, not the illegal aliens who could conceivably be added to the taxpaying pool that supports those benefits.
This means that the United States will be borrowing billions more from the Chinese to pay benefits to illegal aliens who, by their Obama-granted claim on Social Security and Medicare, will also rapidly advance the bankruptcy of the two programs.
We urge you to call or write your Representative and Senators (the Capitol switchboard is 1-866-220-0044) tell them not to allow Obama’s planned illegal and unconstitutional amnesty to loot Social Security and Medicare. Tell them those programs are for American citizens and legal immigrants, not illegal aliens.
