Should Trump Ban Social Security For Illegal Immigrants?

Illegal immigrants crossing the southern border dropped sharply when Trump became President, but over 10 million here still try to collect on government benefits.

Most of them don’t pay taxes, but there are some who do—and now they’re demanding the benefits they “paid for.”

This includes Social Security. For those illegals who broke the law to get here but have been happy to pay into social security, and that number has ballooned into the millions.

Now they are demanding their cut. What do you think? Should illegal immigrants who paid into Social Security collect retirement funds?

Vote in our national poll, find out more about how they have been paying into the system below the poll, then share your thoughts in the comments!

The Earnings Suspense File now contains Social Security tax forms that date back to 1937 and are linked to the taxes that were paid on nearly $1.3 trillion in wages. Some of the W-2s in it belong to people who got married and never reported changing their name. Others are people who filled out their tax forms incorrectly. As of 2014, efforts to track these taxpayers down allowed the Social Security Administration to match 171 million tax forms to their rightful owners.

But there are still about 340 million unclaimed tax forms recorded in the file, compared to 270 million nearly a decade ago. A good portion of those forms were filed by employers on behalf of some of the most unlikely funders of Social Security: undocumented immigrants. In fact, illegal immigration is considered largely responsible for the mushrooming of the file, with undocumented workers paying billions in taxes for retirement benefits they will likely never receive.

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.