How Immigrants Saved Social Security
Fri Apr 04, 2008 at 12:45:48 PM PDT
The other day the New York Times had an interesting article about the positive impact that "other than legal" immigrants have on the Social Security system, usually meaning undocumented immigrants.
In the fine print of the 2008 annual report on Social Security, released last week, the program’s trustees noted that growing numbers of "other than legal" workers are expected to bolster the program over the coming decades.
As I've said before, so many right wingnuts (and far too many on the left) just talk about how undocumented immigrants hurt their life. This is just one of many examples that show that nasty anti-immigrant rhetoric doesn't match reality.
The NY Times explains how the Social Security system benefits from the undocumented.
One reason is that many undocumented workers pay taxes during their work lives but don’t collect benefits later. Another is that undocumented workers are entering the United States at ever younger ages and are expected to have more children while they’re here than if they arrived at later ages. The result is a substantial increase in the number of working-age people paying taxes, but a relatively smaller increase in the number of retirees who receive benefits — a double boon to Social Security’s bottom line.
I'd like to see more of this non partisan data make it into the MSP. It seems the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, hate groups spread their unverified, incorrect data and it gets accepted as truth. These distortions are accepted as true, even though they come from known anti-immigrant sources (that are frequently recognised hate groups or their affiliates).
According to the2008 report of the Social Security Trustees the "actuarial balance" of the system is better than it's been since 1993. The cause is "[I]mmigrants. To be specific, better estimates of the taxes and benefits received by illegal immigrants — or, as the trustees refer to them, "other-immigrants".
Kevin Drum sums it up nicely (except undocumented would be preferable to illegal) "it turns out that this shores up the Social Security system to the tune of around $13 billion per year.
Thanks, illegal immigrants!".
