Matt C. Abbott
January 13, 2007
Abortion, illegal immigration, and Social Security
By Matt C. Abbott

The following commentary, by Mark Crutcher, president of Life Dynamics Incorporated, is reprinted from the Dec. 2006 issue of Pro-Life News, the (pro-life) organization's newsletter.

Abortion and Immigration: A Tale of Two Rivers

By Mark Crutcher

We have all seen situations in which some problem appears to have an obvious solution that is being ignored. When this happens in the political arena, we tend to dismiss it as being the fault of "the system." The more likely explanation is that some "dirty little secret" lurks in the shadows that we don't know about and our political leaders don't want us to know about.

Such is the case with the debate over illegal immigration. Today, some politicians are strutting around calling for round-ups and border fences, while others hawk guest-worker programs, amnesty, or instant citizenship. Despite all this grandstanding, both camps are fully aware that these proposals will never solve the problem.

The real solution is to pass legislation making it a federal crime (with mandatory jail time) to knowingly employ someone who is in this country illegally. Although similar laws are already in place, there is a loophole. As long as the worker has a social security number, the employer is off the hook whether that number is legitimate or not. What we need is legislation requiring employers to confirm that anyone they hire is legally eligible to work in the United States. They could do this by simply accessing a government-sponsored system that would instantly tell them whether the prospective employee's social security number is legitimate. Such a system would be easy to create and less cumbersome than the one that currently allows a merchant to authorize a customer's credit card.

The obvious advantage here is that the first time some corporate CEO or small-time roofing contractor violates this law and ends up on the evening news in handcuffs and leg-irons, the illegal immigration problem is history. At that point, our biggest task would be unsnarling the traffic jams on the southbound lanes of Interstate 35.

The reason Congress isn't pursuing this painfully obvious solution becomes clear when we analyze the financial tsunami that is rolling toward the United States.

Very shortly, America's baby boomers will start reaching retirement age and they will do so at the rate of about 10,000 per day for the next 18 years. Contrary to what most people seem to think, the money baby boomers are owed through social security is long gone. Over the years, Congress grabbed it, left an IOU in its place, and squandered it to buy votes.

In the [2000] presidential election, Al Gore blathered endlessly about the need for a "lock box" to protect the funds being held by the social security system. He was lying. He knows good and well that there is no need for such a lock box because Congress has been running a Ponzi scheme with social security and there is no money left to protect. The result is that the day is rapidly approaching when younger taxpayers will be forced to send boxcars full of their money to the government in order to pay for services that were already paid for once. Any way you cut it, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the baby boomers are going to be taxed into oblivion replacing the money that was stolen by Congress.

That's where abortion comes in. The designers of social security based it on an assumption of an ever-growing, or at least stabile, workforce. They could not foresee that America would one day legalize the wholesale slaughter of its own children. But on January 22, 1973, that is precisely what happened. The result has been that at least one-fourth of the taxpayers needed to replace the money baby boomers paid into the system, were wiped out before drawing their first breath. Moreover, for every day the American holocaust continues, another 3300 future taxpayers are executed in the womb. To appreciate the impact of this, consider that since abortion has been legal, birth rates in the United States have often been below population replacement levels. In fact, if one removes immigration from the census figures, America's population has been flat or, by some estimates, in decline. For the social security system, that has been a disaster waiting to happen and the wait is just about over.

Today, there is a vigorous national debate going on about whether illegal immigrants are only taking jobs American workers don't want anyway. That may or may not be true. However, it is undeniable that illegal immigrants are replacing workers who were killed through abortion.

To understand the significance of this, it is necessary to dispel a myth. Most people seem to believe that illegal workers are only paid in cash and, therefore, pay no taxes or social security. That is not true. According to experts in this field, most illegal immigrants get their jobs by using counterfeit social security cards purchased on the black market. This means that taxes and social security are deducted from their checks. But since they are illegal, no matter how much they pay into the social security system, they can never take money out of it. This is what makes illegal immigration such a bonanza for Congress.

In recent years, the amount of money paid into the system that will never be paid out in benefits has become so large that the government now factors it into Social Security Administration projections. In fact, the IRS has even assigned this fund a name. It's called the "earnings suspense file" and it currently brings in between six and seven billion dollars a year. The IRS says that about three-fourths of this money comes from the paychecks of illegal immigrants. Some independent sources claim the percentage is higher.

Ironically, this has created a situation in which a minimum wage illegal immigrant working on a fake social security card and paying little in social security, is ultimately more valuable to the system than a high-income legal worker who pays in the maximum. That's because legal workers generally get more back from social security than they pay in, while illegal workers operating on phony social security cards get back nothing.

When it comes to illegal immigration, this is the "dirty little secret" America's politicians don't want you to know. It is also why this debate about whether or not illegal workers should be given some sort of legal status is such a waste of time. For Congress, only illegal immigrants are an asset. The instant they are made legal, they become an enormous liability. So make no mistake about it, they will remain illegal.

Naturally, there are people who will challenge my suggestion that the government makes a profit off illegal immigration. They will point out that the American people are being forced to spend astronomical amounts of money on education, medical care, law enforcement, welfare, etc. for people who are in the country illegally.

They are correct. There is indeed a large and expanding catalogue of financial burdens linked to illegal immigration. What is overlooked, however, is that the overwhelming majority of these expenses are born by the states, while the social security deducted from the paychecks of illegal workers goes only to the feds.

In effect, illegal immigration has become a pipeline for transferring money from the states to the federal government. So even if the overall financial burden of illegal immigration far exceeds its benefits to the social security system, since the states pay most of the expenses and the feds get all of the revenue, Congress has a vested interest in not rocking the boat. Given that Congress is the one that makes immigration policy, it's a safe bet that any changes are going to be little more than superficial.

The bottom line is that the illegal immigration issue has less to do with people crossing the Rio Grande than it does with the 535 grifters camped out on the Potomac. Every member of Congress knows that they can stop illegal immigration, but they also know that doing so would expose the social security scam they've been running. That's why their "strategy" for dealing with this issue has been to tap-dance around it and trust that the media and the public will eventually become distracted by something else.

Of course, the link between illegal immigration and social security is just a symptom. The disease is legalized abortion and its assumption that we can savagely execute innocent human beings without consequence. In 1973, America bought that lie and, now, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Of course, the fallout from the legalization of abortion will ultimately go far beyond the costs of illegal immigration. Let's not forget that a generation that killed its own children whenever it found them inconvenient, unhealthy or expensive will soon be inconvenient, unhealthy and expensive itself. At that point, we will likely find that when a society morally bankrupts itself by legalizing abortion, it is then conditioned to solve the financial and social problems created by an aging population by methods which previous generations would have considered unthinkable. Maybe then we will understand that God was serious when He said that we reap what we sow.

© Matt C. Abbott

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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Matt C. Abbott

Matt C. Abbott is a Catholic commentator with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication, media and theatre from Northeastern Illinois University. He's been interviewed on MSNBC, NPR, WLS-TV (ABC) in Chicago, WMTV (NBC) in Madison, Wis., and has been quoted in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He can be reached at mattcabbott@gmail.com.


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