IMMIGRATION

NY Times - The Social Security Administration receives billions in free money each year from an unexpected source: undocumented immigrants.

This group paid an estimated $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, according to a recent analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning tax research group. Since unauthorized workers cannot collect retirement and other Social Security benefits without a change to their immigration status, the billions they pour into the program effectively act as a subsidy for American beneficiaries. 

NY Times Editorial - Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades.In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities might disappear. The challenges prompted Fumio Kishida, then the prime minister, to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

An effective American immigration system requires three big shifts in federal policy, and all three are necessary for any to succeed.

1. The government must make every reasonable effort to prevent people from living and working illegally in the United States. Congress should allocate the resources necessary to secure the nation’s borders and to overhaul the shambolic asylum system so that decisions are made at the border. To further deter people from coming to the United States to seek work — including the significant share of undocumented workers who enter the country legally, on temporary visas, and then remain illegally — the United States also needs to hold employers accountable for the legal status of their workers.

2. Congress should legislate an orderly expansion of legal immigration, including a role for the federal government in directing people to the places that would benefit from population growth and in underwriting the transition costs.

3. The nation also needs to deal humanely with the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants who already live here, including the more than three million “Dreamers” brought to this country as children. For too long, large parts of the economy have depended on the labor of immigrants neither paid nor treated as the equals of Americans, a system of exploitation that also undermines American workers and law-abiding employers. Most immigrants who have made their lives in this country should be given a path to citizenship.

 CNN - Anti-immigrant state officials and federal judges would have new power to dictate immigration enforcement — including whether to detain individual migrants — under a GOP bill that has passed the House and is moving forward in the Senate with bipartisan support. The Laken Riley Act aims to overturn Supreme Court precedent and give states such as Texas the ability to bring the types of immigration lawsuits against the federal government that have been rejected by the courts, including conservative judges, legal experts say. But it would go further, also authorizing state attorneys general to sue to overturn the decisions to release individual immigrants — and even to obtain wide-reaching sanctions on a foreign country for refusing to accept a national eligible for removal.