A key plank of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign tirades against undocumented immigrants was that they drain vital social services that are facing insolvency threats. “Unlike the Democrats, who are KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE by allowing the INVASION OF THE MIGRANTS, I will NOT, under any circumstance, allow either of these two precious GEMS to be even touched under a Trump Administration,” he posted on Truth Social in one characteristic broadside last year.
A reduction in the undocumented immigrant population isn’t going to free up funds for these vital services, it’s going to strain them.
But a New York Times report cites new data confirming the reality is just the opposite: Undocumented immigrants pay into these services but are ineligible to benefit from them. It isn’t the United States that is being exploited, as Trump and his acolytes would have you believe, but the immigrants who help finance its most popular social services without getting access to them. Experts have long pointed out this fact, but the new data underscores just how consequential Trump’s pernicious lie is as he gears up for mass deportations.
As the Times reports:
[Undocumented immigrants] 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. But 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.
The article also explains that if Trump were to follow through on his stated agenda of trying to rid the country of its 11 million undocumented immigrants, “it could cost Social Security roughly $20 billion in cash flow annually.”
A similar dynamic applies to Medicare. The payroll taxes that undocumented immigrants pay are a major source of funding for the health benefit program, but those same immigrants are unable to access Medicare benefits.
A reduction in the undocumented immigrant population isn’t going to free up funds for these vital services, it’s going to strain them — and accelerate their insolvency dates.
As the Times explains, one likely reason that at least half of undocumented immigrants file federal taxes is to show “good moral character.” This serves as a badge of assimilation, and could theoretically be used to help them in immigration cases “related to deportation or putting them on the road to citizenship.”
But there is of course no guarantee, particularly in today’s political climate, that undocumented immigrants will ever get anything in return. The only thing they can be sure of is the higher wages that many of them receive for their work in the U.S., and the benefit that wage advantage can have for their families back home.
A Center for American Progress Action Fund report published last year points out that the likelihood that Social Security or other social services that require a Social Security number are distributed to an undocumented immigrant is exceedingly small. “The rate of all improper payments for Social Security is less than 1 percent of total benefits paid, suggesting that there are not large numbers of undocumented immigrants wrongfully collecting benefits,” the report says.
None of this is to say that the status quo is acceptable. The just solution here would be to allow workers who are paying for social services to receive those benefits. It’s also logistical and economic common sense to provide a robust path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants “When you take workers out of the underground economy, and actually allow them the chance to thrive and contribute their skills, they’ll be able to get better jobs, higher wages, and they’ll be able to create revenue and economy growth for everyone,” Debu Gandhi, a senior director for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, told me.
Trump’s fictions about undocumented immigrants are key to his central economic argument that America will be improved once it is rid of onerous outsiders. But in reality, the opposite is true — immigrants are a key part of the engine of the economy, and often don’t get to partake in the fruit of their labor.