Most of the states with suspected high populations of illegals are in the sunbelt, where the economies are generally growing. You don't think Gringos living in these states pay taxes? Whether those state's economic growth is related to the presence of illegals I don't know, but suspect there could be some causal relationship there.
I worked for the IRS in California during the 70's and 80's and NEVER met a farm worker that paid any taxes. At that time agricultural wages were exempt from Social Security taxes. It pi$$ed me off that I was making about $15,000 a year then and paying the full load of taxes (no employee discount), and the average farm worker in Castroville, Salinas, and Watsonville was making $25,000 a year, paying ZERO taxes and getting welfare to boot. I knew of several that were sharecropping with the local farmers and making up to $100,000 a year--again no taxes. I know from first-hand experience the tax non-compliance among illegals is VERY HIGH. These people are a net DRAIN on the country.
And BTW, if these people have been, or are paying into Social Security, and they get some sweetheart amnesty/citizenship deal from our perverted congress, they will then be legally entitled to SS benefits, and the "bulge" in the Suspense File will turn into a huge hole.
Something changed since then.
IRCA, as the immigration act is known, did little to deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants or to discourage them from working. But for Social Security's finances, it was a great piece of legislation.
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.
Other researchers say illegal immigrants are the main contributors to the suspense file. "Illegal immigrants account for the vast majority of the suspense file," said Nick Theodore, the director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Especially its growth over the 1990's, as more and more undocumented immigrants entered the work force."
Using data from the Census Bureau's current population survey, Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, estimated that 3.8 million households headed by illegal immigrants generated $6.4 billion in Social Security taxes in 2002.
IF you worked for the IRs as you said that you did, you know just how impossible claiming payments you made under a fictitious name or with a stolen SS card would be.