Last weekend, a leading Republican senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, and second-rate Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois had an argument on the Senate floor as to whether undocumented immigrants are eligible to receive checks from the pandemic bill, President Joe Biden. signed on Thursday, the U.S. Rescue Plan Act.
Cruz said “every illegal alien in America” will receive a $ 1400 check. Durbin responded that Cruz’s statement was ‘just false’ because he said: ‘Immigrant papers do not have a social security number, and they do not qualify for stimulus relief, period.’
They were both wrong.
Facts first: Cruz was inaccurate when he said “every” immigrant without papers would receive a $ 1400 relief grant; it is clear that most undocumented immigrants will not do so. Durbin was inaccurate when he undoubtedly said that undocumented immigrants do not have the social security numbers and do not qualify for a period of checks. A minority of undocumented people, such as those who came to the U.S. with work visas who later expired, do have social security numbers; those numbers do not expire. The new law, such as legal aid legislation signed by then-President Donald Trump last year, does not distinguish between social security numbers used by undocumented persons on their tax forms and the personal numbers used by citizens and legal residents on their tax forms.
“You can be in the country without a work permit, you can be a non-US citizen, and still have your SSN and qualify for the payments,” said Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a former federal government tax official.
The text of the new law says that in order to receive checks, someone needs a valid social security number and cannot be a foreigner abroad. The IRS explains on its website that immigrants without documents qualify as resident aliens for tax purposes if they are physically present in the U.S. for sufficient days.
Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute Brainstorm, said that ‘the way the bill is written, as long as someone has issued a valid Social Security Administration number, would be eligible for the stimulus payments. ”
Social Security Administration spokeswoman Dorothy Clark said that ‘once a Social Security number (SSN) has been assigned to a suitable person, it is still a valid SSN. Social Security does not invalidate SSNs or revoke them after valid commands. ‘
Gelatt warned that we do not yet know how the Internal Revenue Service will interpret the law regarding the suitability of undocumented persons with social security numbers. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.
However, there is no current indication that the Biden government will attempt to persuade the IRS to make a difficult and time-consuming effort to distinguish undocumented people with social security numbers from others with social security numbers.
Holtzblatt said the IRS had not been able to obtain the immigration details needed to separate the two groups in the past. And the White House says payments under the relief bill are going out all this weekend.
“President Biden and his administration are committed to issuing economic impact payments to legal recipients as quickly as possible,” a White House spokesman said on condition of anonymity after explaining that some undocumented individuals were eligible for checks.
Not the first time
It is important to note that this would not be the first time that undocumented people with social security numbers could gain access to some government benefits.
The non-partisan Congressional Research Service said in a 2012 report that visa survivors with Social Security numbers could try to use those numbers to get certain tax credits – and that it appears that Congress did not intend this group of people to take the credits in question, the IRS at that time did not try to find out if a taxpayer with a face-to-face SSN exceeded his or her visa. ‘
And the Congressional Research Service said in a 2020 report that an undocumented immigrant who has a social security number, such as someone who has exceeded a visa, would “generally” receive a check under the first pandemic bill that Trump signed the CARES law last March. , “If they meet the other requirements.”
Cruz voted in favor of the bill, which passed the Senate 96-0. Cruz voted against the second bill on Trump, which passed the Senate 92-6, and against the new bill under Biden, which passed the Senate 50-49 along party lines.
A smaller group
Steve Guest, a communications adviser to Cruz, admitted in an email that Cruz had spoken incorrectly when he said “every illegal alien in America” would get a check under the U.S. Rescue Plan Act. Guest said Cruz intended to say that a check to “every illegal alien in America who has a social security number.” Guest said it was important to note that the erroneous mistake in the Senate came during the second morning of a marathon meeting that allowed senators to vote all night, and that Cruz only had one minute to go over a complicated topic.)
Cruz deserves no medals here, as his serious exaggeration started the chain of inaccuracy. But he had a valid point when he complained about early media the coverage that suggested Durbin was completely correct in his response to Cruz.
An aid from Durbin, who commented on condition of anonymity, did not explicitly admit that Durbin was inaccurate, but did acknowledge that some undocumented persons had a social number. The assistant noted that Cruz is now talking about a much smaller group of people possibly receiving checks than he did in his comments on the Senate floor.
It is not clear how many people are in this smaller group. It consists of undocumented people who obtained a social security number (for example as a visa holder or as an asylum seeker), who later lost their legal authorization to stay in the country, remained in any case and still filed tax forms using make of the Social Security Number.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 46% of the total U.S. undocumented population of about 11 million people is made up of visas, Gelatt said. But a large percentage of these visa stays were never eligible for Social Security numbers because they came to the U.S. in the short term for tourist or business visas. The population of potential recipients for relief is thus a subset of another subset of the total undocumented population.