What’s Wrong with Preventing Legalized Workers from Gaining Credit for Their Social Security Contributions?
Wildly inaccurate allegations have appeared on talk radio, the Internet, and inflammatory 2006 campaign ads, [12] such as that last year’s Senate-passed bill would have allowed undocumented people to qualify for Social Security benefits, or would have taken benefits from other seniors and given them to the undocumented. Many who support the Ensign amendment or related proposals base their positions on this misinformation. Others tend to argue that failure to seize these contributions would “reward millions of illegal immigrants for criminal behavior while our Social Security system is already in crisis.”[13] But all of the comprehensive immigration reform proposals include significant punitive fines as well as tough and lengthy mechanisms for legalizing immigrants to “earn” legal status and eventually equal citizenship rights. And impoverishing millions of seniors who have paid into the system is an ineffective way to address the longstanding problems with Social Security as a whole. O
