Bush Plan: Social Security for 'Legalized' Illegal Aliens

By Jeff Johnson, CNSNews

December 8, 2005

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=%5CPolitics%5Carchive%5C200512%5CPOL20051208a.html

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 temporary or "guest worker" program advocated by President Bush, the White House might use the legislative opportunity to seek approval for an International Social Security Agreement with Mexico, something it has wanted for more than two years.

Mark Kirkorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Cybercast News Service that the arrangements, usually called "totalization agreements," with industrialized countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and even France are beneficial. But those benefits, he argued, would not come from an agreement with Mexico.

"The point to a totalization agreement is for two advanced countries that occasionally send corporate transferees from one country to the next for a two or three year stint to be able to reconcile their respective retirement systems," Kirkorian said. "It's not for a third world country that sends millions of peasants into a developed country to take advantage of; there's a complete mismatch, an imbalance."

Kirkorian points out a number of differences between the U.S. and Mexican Social Security systems including:

* Workers are vested in the U.S. system in 10 years versus 24 years in Mexico;

* The U.S. pays greater benefits to lower income workers whereas Mexico pays out only the premiums paid in, plus accrued interest; and

* Most Mexican workers avoid their country's Social Security system by working in the "underground economy," while most U.S. workers have Social Security taxes automatically collected from their wages.

The U.S. has entered into totalization agreements with 20 countries since 1978....

Congress does not have to give approval for the totalization agreements, but lawmakers are given the opportunity to vote them down....

In March of 2003, the SSA's Office of the Chief Actuary estimated that a totalization agreement with Mexico would cost the U.S. $78 million in the first year, growing to $650 million (in constant 2002 dollars) by 2050...

Kirkorian believes those would be the unintended consequences of the president's proposed "guest worker" program.

"If the president gets his way and [those illegal aliens are] legalized, and he submits this totalization agreement to Congress," Kirkorian warned, "then all of the illegal aliens who get this 'amnesty' that he wants, get to count all of their Social Security payments when they were illegal toward their eventual retirement....

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