Everything's always a secret conspiracy with these people. That, and material for a fundraising drive.
The Senior Citizens League, a conservative outfit focused, as the name suggests, on scaring the crap out of senior citizens in order to best solicit money from them, is out with a new mailer that claims:
"of all the items being considered by our leaders in Washington, the illegal immigration amnesty plans hatched by the Obama administration presents the greatest potential threat to Social Security." The mailer also contains a personalized complaint form that individuals can fill out and return to the Senior Citizens League, which the group would then send to their elected officials in Congress. Not surprisingly, the reply form asks for a donation "to help cover the cost" of the national petition. The group used similar scare tactics to derail President Barack Obama's health care reform law.
The premise is that if we were to allow a path to citizenship for people already in the country, those people would
then expect Social Security benefits and all the other accoutrements of citizenship, and
how dare they, and somehow that's going to mean less money for you and yours, grandma.
There's an obvious flaw in this logic, of course. Many undocumented workers already pay Social Security taxes, as well as a great deal of other taxes, and they don't get much benefit back because, as undocumented workers, they don't have a right to. Right now, the Huffington Post points out that undocumented workers have contributed almost 10 percent of the overall total in the Social Security Trust Fund; allowing a more secure legal status for those people is, if anything, only going to boost the taxes they pay.
The alternative argument, and the one the conservatives are making, is that while that's all fine and good it'd be even better to just steal these people's money for taxes and provide nothing—the same premise of an indentured class that motivates a great deal of conservative labor policy when it comes to suspiciously brown people. Even if we were to take the conservative argument completely at face value and presume that giving current undocumented workers Social Security in exchange for the Social Security taxes we're taking from them would be a net financial loss for us, the only way to make that argument is to openly advocate that we act like crooks. Which is, well, what they're doing.
As for the basic argument presented, however—the notion that brown people are coming for our senior citizens' Social Security checks—it is of course gibberish. No, conservative seniors, allowing a bit of basic human dignity for the people we currently exploit eight ways from Sunday will not affect the government checks you keep getting. You might be a bit more worried about government efforts to trim your future checks via a few neat accounting tricks that are apparently all the rage with the "serious" crowd, these days, but undocumented workers are involved in exactly none of those plots, and in fact are treated even worse than you are.