Have they actually done anything other than profit from the illegal presence of undocumented people within our borders?
The government is not only failing to enforce the laws on employers benefiting from illegal labor, but now they themselves are attempting to increase their profiteering from the continued and increasing presence of illegal aliens within our borders. Adding insult to injury, they'll tax us as well in the process.
Once they accomplish the feat of turning illegal aliens into yet another source of income -- just in Social Security alone illegal immigrants pay approximately 7 billion dollars per year into the system -- they will never take action that would decrease their income.
Starting in the late 1980's, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect - sometimes simply fictitious - Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to.
The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990's, two and a half times the amount of the 1980's.
In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes.
In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.
Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.
"Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes," said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration. -- Source
People need to wake up, quit allowing the government to play them like Tennessee fiddles when it comes to the subject of illegal aliens, and demand that they enforce the existing laws before supporting any more new laws. And we need to understand the underlying factors driving the government's inactions on the illegal immigrant issue, then demand that those factors be addressed.
Here's some interesting data from a government-funded publication that sheds light on the subject:
Many attempts have been made to estimate the fiscal impact of immigration, which not only generates demand for public education, health care, and other services, but also expands the tax base and slows the aging of the population. Some economists rely on cross-sectional estimates, using current data on immigrant households to compare benefits received from the government at all levels and taxes paid this year. But to investigate the long-term fiscal impact, analysis must take into account the expected payments over the life of an immigrant, and even the lifetimes of the immigrant’s children and grandchildren.According to a study panel under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, the longterm impact of a newly arrived immigrant turns out to depend greatly on the immigrant’s age at arrival. An average 20-year-old has many years in which to work and pay taxes before reaching the age when individuals typically receive more from the government than they pay in taxes. A 50-year old, by contrast, is expected to work for only a few more years before becoming a net consumer of government services. The long-term impact also varies significantly with the immigrant’s education: Those with more education are likely to pay higher taxes during their working years, and the benefits they receive from government are not proportionately higher.
In a recent update of estimates prepared for the panel, Ronald Lee and Timothy Miller found that each additional immigrant with characteristics (such as age, education, and family size) typical of recent immigrants has a “net present value” of $46,000. That is, a new immigrant’s impact over the next 75 years is expected to be equivalent to a one-time investment of $46,000. But Lee and Miller estimate that the country would need to admit an additional 5 million immigrants per year, quintupling the current level of immigration, in order to achieve long-term balance in the Social Security trust fund. A recent report from the United Nations Population Division reached a similar conclusion for European countries, announcing that even much larger migration flows than are currently permitted would not counterbalance the effects of population aging.
To maintain the 2000 ratio between the working-age population (people between the ages of 20 and 64) and the older population (people ages 65 and older), the United States would need roughly 95 million more working-age persons in 2025, in addition to those already expected at current levels of immigration. In other words, if the entire working-age population of Mexico were to move to the United States in 2025, there still would not be enough people to restore the old-age dependency ratio of 2000. -- Report on American Government Spending
So, increasing the ability of the government to use illegal aliens as a source of income will only encourage the government to allow an increase in illegal aliens entering the country.
The problem is that most people will no more read the information I've just provided, than think beyond their knee jerk reaction to flimflammery such as the one being suggested here under the guise of "doing something about the illegal alien issue."