Posted on 02/01/2002 10:47:45 PM PST by Bayou City
Feb. 1, 2002, 9:48PM
Workers hope IRS has their number
Undocumented immigrants sign up for tax rolls
By EDWARD HEGSTROM
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
CONROE -- The overflow crowd stretched out the church door and into the parking lot, where the line formed for hundreds of illegal immigrants hoping to become legal U.S. taxpayers.
After a wait outside of an hour or more, participants at the seminar this week filled out a government form, presented their Mexican or Central American identification and then met with an IRS agent.
Nearly 500 signed up for the document known as an individual taxpayer identification number after being assured their information would not be shared with immigration agents.
Some in line said they hope paying taxes legally would be the first step of legalizing their U.S. stay. Others say taxes are already taken automatically from their paycheck, and they hope to get some back through a refund check.
"I want to be recognized," said one Spanish-speaking woman who identified herself only as a clerk. "I've been paying taxes for three years."
With 7 million to 8 million people now working illegally in this country, the Internal Revenue Service has quietly begun trying to register them as taxpayers.
Since 1996, the government has offered a taxpayer ID number to anyone who cannot obtain a Social Security number -- typically because they are working in the country illegally.
Local IRS agents now offer grants and seminars designed to get illegal immigrants officially registered on the tax rolls.
"The more of these we do, the more people come in," said IRS representative Leandro Leon, who has organized the seminars promoted by Spanish-language television and held at churches that attract Latin American immigrants. "I guess people are losing their fear of the INS."
Houston is not the only city with a surge in applications. The IRS reports that 5.3 million people have obtained a taxpayer ID number since 1996, though officials cannot say how many are illegal immigrants (foreigners living overseas who file U.S. taxes use the same type of ID number).
Not all the immigrant outreach is so amicable. Some illegal immigrants say the IRS has aggressively attempted to collect back taxes.
IRS representatives defend their efforts to enroll undocumented workers without reporting them to immigration authorities. They say their mandate is to collect the taxes from those who work rather than to determine who has the right to work.
"One requirement of the tax law is that people have to report their taxes, even if the money comes illegally," said Don Roberts, an IRS spokesman in Washington. "A person could report millions of dollars from drug dealing and we can't share that information with the DEA."
Congress set up the law so taxpayers who accurately report their income to the IRS can be assured the information will never be shared with other government agencies. Even law-abiding citizens would be reluctant to report their income if that information could be passed around among bureaucrats in Washington, Roberts reasons.
But critics say the taxpayer ID number system clearly indicates the government is no longer interested in enforcing immigration laws.
"It doesn't make sense," said Roy Beck, head of Numbers USA, a group that opposes high immigration levels. "The federal government is saying: "You are breaking the law and shouldn't be working, but now that you are working, we will give you this number that makes it easier for you to work.' "
A person cannot legally work in the United States without a Social Security card. But that doesn't stop millions from working anyway.
Some illegal immigrants are paid in cash never reported to the government. But perhaps millions of others obtain false Social Security cards or borrow others' Social Security numbers. Employers sometimes pay taxes on these workers' earnings.
The proliferation of false Social Security numbers frustrates the government tax people.
"We kept finding cases like the 90-year-old woman listed as working as a stevedore at the Port of Houston," said Leon.
No one knows how much immigrants pay in taxes every year, though plenty of experts have tried to guess.
A few years ago, retired Rice University professor Donald Huddle found in a study for a conservative group that immigrants cost the government $69 billion a year because they use more in services than they pay in taxes.
Liberal groups attacked Huddle's oft-quoted study as inaccurate and based on false assumptions. Urban Institute demographer Jeff Passel found a different answer.
"If you look at this in terms of a lifetime, an immigrant contributes more than he or she uses," Passel said. "But in the short run, there are costs."
That's a sentiment shared by Alejandro, an undocumented carpenter from rural Fort Bend County with a wife and two kids who pays $185 in IRS back taxes every month. The Mexican native, who won't give his last name, says he was approached on the job a few years ago by government agents wondering why he had a false Social Security number.
The IRS now calculates Alejandro owes about $4,000, according to documents. He is dutifully paying the money, he says.
Alejandro said he gets angry every time he sees American politicians arguing on Spanish-language TV that immigrants don't pay taxes.
"We come here to work. We don't come here to be fed," he said.
What other conclusion can be drawn?
I think we are already there.
I have met folks who travel by private jet from gated community to gated community. They consider everything else Calcutta, to be driven through swiftly in tinted winowed SUVs. They could care less what % of "Calcutta" is literate, or foreign. "How does it affect my bottom line" is their only consideration.
I can, it's TREASON.
The thing I keep wondering about is: How will they keep the property? What's to stop the little people from voting to take the property? Guys like Peter Schey are trying to bring socialism through third-world immigration, so what plan is it that the estate dwellers have to prevent Peter from getting that? I'd love to know.
For now all the Republican elite can see is an endless supply of ever cheaper labor, and all the DemonRats can see is an endless supply of DemonRat voters voting themselves benefits.
Isn’t that the truth. The government created this crisis of massive uncontrolled immigration, then it aggravates it further by encouraging illegal aliens to break more laws and we, the American Citizens, are forced to suffer in countless ways as the government creates a police state to control the very chaos it started in the first place when they threw America's doors open to the rest of the world. The government’s actions are circular, totally at odds with itself and completely anti-American and anti-Citizen.
Do you ever get the feeling that we are like laboratory rats in some warped social experiment by some faceless cabal of global élites? The days of freedom in America are numbered.
Do you know-what-the-Matrix-is?
And I think it is HIGH TIME to change the way our government works.
Yes. I would consider the World Trade Tower bombings as acting contrary to our foreign policy, but obviously you think their is flawed reasoning here. How might you change such flawed reasoning?
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