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An organization of retirees has announced the release, after three years of arguments and a Freedom of Information request, by the Social Security Administration of a copy of the first known public copy of the U.S.-Mexico Social Security Totalization Agreement. The TREA Senior Citizens League said the document reveals what was expected, a huge threat to the future of Social Security, because any Mexican worker who has as little as 18 months of employment history in the United States could end up qualifying for some Social Security retirement benefits. The organization of retirees, whose leaders have tried to convince Congress...

An agreement the Bush administration reached with Mexico on Social Security benefits would allow illegal aliens granted amnesty in the future to claim credit for the time they worked illegally. The TREA Senior Citizens League, a Social Security advocacy group, recently obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act, and said it confirms the group's worst fears. The document is a jumble of definitions and legal language, but a spokesman for the group said what's important is what's not in the text: It does nothing to prevent undocumented aliens who later get legal status from receiving benefits for the...

(CNSNews.com) - Illegal aliens who work under borrowed, stolen or fraudulent Social Security numbers could collect retirement benefits based on their illegal earnings as the result of a Bush administration plan. Critics charge the federal government has grossly underestimated the cost of the proposal, which they believe could run be billions of dollars per year. Congress is expected to vote on some combination of proposed changes to immigration laws as early as next week, according to sources working with the House Homeland Security and Judiciary committees. While members have not been able to reach agreement on the details of a...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- After numerous refusals over three and a half years, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has released the first known public copy of the U.S.-Mexico Social Security Totalization Agreement. The government was forced to make the disclosure in response to lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act by TREA Senior Citizens League, a 1.2 million-member nonpartisan seniors advocacy group. The Totalization Agreement could allow millions of illegal Mexican workers to draw billions of dollars from the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund. The agreement between the U.S. and Mexico was signed in June 2004, and is...

WASHINGTON -- "We might be on the cusp of giving billions of dollars worth of our senior's Social Security money to illegal Mexican workers, and it's getting almost no media attention whatsoever," warned Brad Phillips, a spokesman for TREA Senior Citizens League, one of the nation's largest nonpartisan seniors groups with 1.2 million members. TREA Senior Citizens League filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in U.S. District Court Thursday morning - after what the group styled as "numerous refusals over three years by the U.S. Department of State and Social Security Administration to provide a draft of -...

President Bush has refused to meet with border law-enforcement officials from Texas for a second time. His response to their request came in the form of a letter Monday, angering both lawmakers and sheriffs. In fact, some Republican members of the House, upset by what they call the administration's seeming lack of concern for border security, are preparing to hold investigative hearings in San Diego and Laredo, Texas, early next month. Members of the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation hope to expose serious security flaws that could potentially lead to terrorist attacks in the country, said Rep. Ted...

Nearly 159,000 immigrants whose visas will expire in the next five years will continue working illegally in the United States, federal investigators say. That would cost the government money in unjustified Social Security payments. It would aggravate the overall illegal-immigration burden, which Congress is now closer to confronting again. And it could threaten homeland security, investigators warn. "Unauthorized work by immigrants ... weakens Social Security numbers' integrity and may require that the agency pay future benefits to these individuals," Social Security investigators note in their new report. Moreover, "they may obtain employment in sensitive areas." But the latest evidence about...

The U.S.-Mexico Totalization Agreement The U.S. Commissioner of Social Security signed a totalization agreement with the Director General of the Mexican Social Security Institute on June 29, 2004. Now that the agreement has been signed, it must be reviewed first by the State Department, and then by the White House, which will submit it to Congress. Congress will have then have 60 "legislative" days to review the agreement. During this period, current law authorizes either Chamber to pass a Resolution of Disapproval of the agreement, or it will take effect automatically at the end of the 60-day period. In addition,...

Totalization With Mexico Could "Total" Social Security Recently, I received a letter from Edward I. Nelson, the Chairman of United States Border Control, regarding a proposed “Totalization Treaty/Agreement” with Mexico. This is not a subject with which I am unfamiliar, as I wrote an article about it while I was a reporter for Talon News/GOPUSA.com, viewable here. (I have to refer you to this website, as the archives at Talon News are no longer available since the “Gannon-gate” ordeal.) Totalization agreements were begun to help employees sent abroad to still have enough credits to draw Social Security benefits with the...

President George W. Bush wants to give illegal aliens the Social Security lockbox key.His Social Security Totalization Agreement with Mexico will give illegals money he claims will not be there when younger Americans retire. The diabolical brilliance of Dubya's self-fulfilling prophesy is extraordinario. That's Spanish for extraordinary, amigo.Or as the two cutout figures in the Guiness beer commercials say --"brilliant!"If Congress is stupid enough to agree, it will make Bush's case that Social Security insolvency is just around the corner (a street corner full of illegals taking jobs that should be for Americans).The United States has totalization programs with 20...

QUITO, Ecuador Mexico and Washington agreed to introduce similar legislative initiatives whereby Mexican workers who paid into Social Security in the United States will be refunded their contributions when they return to their homeland, President Vicente Fox said here Monday. "The initiatives entail the recognition of all those (Mexicans) who have worked in the United States legally or otherwise, so they will have the right to the savings they accumulated while working in the neighboring country," said Fox, who is visiting Ecuador. During a news conference with Mexican journalists accompanying him on his travels, Fox announced that he and U.S....

LOU DOBBS TONIGHT Aired September 22, 2004 Three million illegal aliens will enter this country this year. As many as 12 million are already here. So why all the talk of amnesty? We'll have a special report. And an exclusive report on what the governments of the United States and Mexico had hoped would be a secret agreement, an agreement that would encourage millions more illegal aliens to enter this country. REP. DANA ROHRABACHER (R), CA: If we spend more money and we provide more benefits to illegal immigrants, there will be more illegal immigrants. (END VIDEO CLIP) DOBBS: Congressman...

A year ago, this organization warned that the Bush Administration was planning to do something unthinkable - they were seriously considering signing a pact with Mexico that would give any Mexican who had worked in the U.S., including illegal aliens, full U.S. Social Security benefits, paid out of your Social Security Trust Fund! It seemed so far fetched, we had trouble convincing the Congress that it could happen. A White House spokesman denied our claim that it was on a fast track, stating the ongoing discussions for Totalization were just informal and preliminary. But we knew better. We had obtained...