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The Biden administration has announcedan agreementwith Panama and Colombia to reduce illegal migration through the dangerous Darien Gap. Its a jungle chokepoint that illegal migrants headed for the U.S. from South America and beyond have to traverse, often at the cost of their lives. (See the video of apanel discussionthe Center hosted on the subject featuring a local Indian leader, war correspondent Michael Yon, and Representative Tom Tiffany [R., Wis.] who personally visited the area.)

Youll not be surprised that traffic through the Darien hasballoonedin response to Bidens catch-and-release policies at the border. You also wont be surprised that the Biden administration response is not to change the policies that serve as a magnet to illegal immigration, but to try to define away the problem by making the migration legal.

The second of the ambitious goals of the new agreement is: Open new lawful and flexible pathways for tens of thousands of migrants and refugees as an alternative to irregular migration. In other words, come up with legal ways to admit the prospective illegal border-jumpers.

But if genuinely legal means were available, theyd already be using them. Instead, this signals an expansion of what Andy McCarthy aptly calls Bidens Immigration Parole Scam.

But the unlawful use of parole is just the tool. The policy served by that tool is one of de facto unlimited immigration. This administration believes that statutory limits on immigrationare illegitimate, and it will undermine those limits if there are more people who want to come here than can be legally admitted. AsByron Yorkput it a few months ago, Republicans want policies that willstop, or at least dramatically reduce, the flow. Democrats want policies that willaccommodatethe flow.

This is mostly true, but not entirely. There are still Republicans (likeNikki Haleyand evenDonald Trump) who also want to accommodate unlimited flows of immigrants, but, likeGeorge W. Bush, prefer using guest-worker programs rather than immigration parole to do it. But the objective is the same immigration without numerical caps.

Id contrast this with the governor of Florida, who saidlast fall:

And this idea of mass immigration, whether its illegal immigration or whether its just mass immigration through the legal process, like the diversity lottery or chain migration, is not conducive to assimilating people into American society.

More of this please.

Continue reading here:
Defining Away Illegal Immigration - Immigration Blog

Summary

Despite oft-heard claims that immigration will bolster Social Security and Medicare, the reality is more complicated. Much of the confusion stems from conflating the impacts of different policies. Toleration of illegal immigration, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and legal immigration are distinct policy choices that require separate analyses. This article explains conceptually how each of these immigration policies would impact the financial health of Social Security and Medicare.

Key points:

This report concludes that immigration is not a practical means of avoiding tax increases and benefit reductions when addressing the future solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

Before discussing the impact of each immigration policy, a few basic points about Social Security and Medicare are in order. First, they have progressive benefit structures. In the case of Social Security, participants contribute the same 12.4 percent tax on all earnings up to the maximum taxable salary, but their benefits increase at a slower rate as their earnings increase. In other words, low earners receive a greater return on their contributions than do high earners.

Importantly, years without work are included as zeroes in the calculation of a workers average earnings. This gives part-career workers a higher-return on their contributions than longer-career workers with the same salary. For example, if a worker earns $100,000 each year for 10 years and then retires, he would pay 50 percent of the taxes paid by a worker who earns $100,000 each year for 20 years. However, the shorter-career worker would receive a Social Security check that is about 58 percent as large.1

Medicare is even more progressive than Social Security because participants need to work for only 10 years at a minimal earnings level to become eligible for the full benefit. In the example above, the shorter-career worker would pay 50 percent of the Medicare taxes as the longer-career worker but would receive 100 percent of the Medicare benefits.

Social Security and Medicare do not establish 401k-style accounts for individual participants. Instead, both programs operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, in which todays workers pay for the benefits of todays retirees. Social Security and Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) are funded with payroll taxes paid into each programs trust fund. All benefits paid by those two programs must flow from their trust funds. By contrast, other Medicare benefits that accompany Part A such as the subsidized medical insurance provided under Part B, and prescription drug coverage under Part D are funded with general tax revenue. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Medicare from this point forward will mean Part A specifically.

The Social Security and Medicare trust funds face a long-term fiscal imbalance, meaning that the future benefits owed to participants exceed the future payroll taxes that the government expects to collect. Without any further action, Social Security benefits will be automatically reduced starting in 2034, and Medicare benefits will be reduced in 2031. To close the gap, the Social Security trust fund is projected to require additional taxes equal to 3.6 percent of covered payroll over the next 75 years, while Medicare will require an additional 0.6 percent.2

Whether immigration will improve or worsen the fiscal imbalance described above depends on the specific policy under consideration.

Illegal Immigration. Illegal immigration improves the finances of Social Security and Medicare for a simple reason: Although illegal immigrants are generally not eligible to collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, many still pay taxes into the system.3 These taxes function as free contributions to the trust funds, as long as the illegal immigrants remain ineligible for benefits. (See the Amnesty section below.)

How do illegal immigrants who are ineligible for benefits still contribute payroll taxes? They do so with a Social Security Number (SSN) acquired one of several ways. They may have received a valid SSN via a temporary work permit but have since overstayed their visa or otherwise lost their status; they may have faked their identity to use someone elses SSN or to acquire their own fraudulently; or they may use an entirely fake SSN.4

A 2013 report from the Social Security Administration estimated that roughly half of illegal immigrant workers use an SSN.5 Two subsequent developments suggest that figure is now higher. First, visa overstayers contributed more to the illegal immigrant population in the 2010s than did people who crossed the border without authorization.6 Second, although border crossings have surged to record levels in this decade, the Biden administrations generous use of the parole power has granted temporary work permits to large numbers of migrants who will not be eligible for entitlement benefits when (and if) their parole expires. In any case, when the number of illegal immigrants who contribute payroll taxes increases, so does the benefit for the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants. Any policy that grants illegal immigrants amnesty i.e., the right to live permanently in the U.S. will likely include work permits and subsequent eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. That eligibility would impose steep costs on the trust funds for two reasons. First, as described above, many illegal immigrants are already paying into the system. Their contributions are in fact part of the Congressional Budget Offices baseline budgetary forecasts. Amnesty would require the government to bear the added cost of these recipients status as new beneficiaries without the added revenue that would normally come from new contributors.7 Second, illegal immigrants tend to earn less and work fewer years in the U.S. than the average participant, meaning amnesty will provide them an above-average return on their contributions.

In short, illegal immigrants as a group are net contributors who partially pay into the trust funds while receiving little in return, but amnesty would transform them into net drains who receive more in benefits than they contribute in taxes. CIS has estimated the per-recipient cost of this dramatic change in status to be $129,000 in present value.8 If 10 million illegal immigrants receive amnesty, the total cost to Social Security and Medicare would be roughly $1.3 trillion, equivalent to a one-time transfer of 6 percent of GDP.9

Legal Immigration in the First Generation. The previous two cases were unambiguous. Illegal immigration increases tax contributions while costing little in new benefits. Amnesty increases benefits while adding little in new tax contributions. By contrast, welcoming new legal immigrants causes substantial increases in both tax contributions and benefit obligations. Determining the net fiscal impact in this case will depend largely on each immigrants income and career duration. Based on a CIS analysis of 2019 data from the American Community Survey (ACS), working-age legal immigrants earned an annual income of about $50,000, which is greater than the $46,000 earned by natives.10 However, because the average age of arrival for legal immigrants was 35, their career durations will be significantly shorter. As noted in the Preliminaries section above, the progressive benefit structures of Social Security and Medicare give shorter-career workers a higher return on their contributions.

A complete fiscal-impact calculation involving income, career duration, longevity, and other factors is beyond the scope of this report. Generally speaking, however, younger and higher-earning legal immigrants will be net contributors to the trust funds during their lifetimes, while older and lower-earning immigrants will be net drains.11

Legal Immigration Extended to the Second Generation. Up to this point, we have analyzed the impact of immigrants within their own lifetimes. If the present value of an immigrants taxes paid is less than the present value of benefits received, then that immigrant is said to be a net drain. But perhaps the entry of immigrants who are net drains within their own lifetimes could still ultimately benefit the trust funds if we consider the next generation. The theory is that the average low-earning immigrant will have several children who collectively pay more into the system than their parent took out.

Unfortunately, immigrant fertility tends to be too low for this theory to work, even among less-skilled groups. Analysis of 2019 ACS data shows that legal immigrants with no more than a high school diploma had a total fertility rate of 2.06 per woman, which is merely replacement level. This one-for-one population replacement (two children per couple) is insufficient to maintain the current ratio of approximately 2.8 workers for every retiree even if, unrealistically, all of the immigrants offspring became working adults. (About 74 percent of Americans ages 18 to 64 are currently working.)

Continuous Legal Immigration. The Social Security trustees project that increasing immigration going forward will lessen the fiscal imbalance over the next 75 years.12 Keep in mind, however, that the trustees are estimating the impact of continuous immigration, not the marginal impact. The immigrants who arrive near the end of those 75 years have the most positive impact because their tax contributions are included in the projection period, while their retirements will occur beyond it. These later-arriving immigrants help to pay for the immigrants who arrive earlier in the period, but they will eventually become costly themselves as their retirements start to fall within the shifting 75-year window which necessitates more immigration, and so on.

The assumption of continuous immigration can generate results that seem almost paradoxical. Even if every new immigrant imposes a lifetime net cost, a high-immigration policy could still appear to have a positive effect as long as the flow continues indefinitely. The term Ponzi scheme is sometimes seen as an epithet, but it accurately describes this funding strategy. Earlier participants are paid with the contributions from new participants, creating an ever-larger liability that would bankrupt the system if the supply of new participants were to ever falter.

We have seen that the impact of immigration on Social Security and Medicare depends on the specific policy under consideration. Illegal immigration improves the solvency of the trust funds, but granting amnesty would reverse those gains and impose additional costs. The impact of new legal immigrants is less clear-cut, as the arrival age and earnings of those immigrants will generally determine their status as net contributors or net drains. Continuous immigration could theoretically keep the programs running even when the immigrants are net drains, but whether such a Ponzi scheme is sustainable is unclear.

Given these differential effects, could expanding immigration allow the U.S. to avoid tax increases and spending cuts when addressing the long-term fiscal imbalance faced by Social Security and Medicare? Not as a practical matter. While carefully selected legal immigrants can be net contributors, attempts to use mass immigration as a comprehensive fix for the trust funds would be fraught with risk. For example, although more illegal immigrants (or legal immigrants ineligible for benefits) would certainly bolster the trust funds, the presence of so many second-class residents would generate political pressure for regularization and subsequent benefit eligibility. Similarly, continually importing low-skill immigrants as part of a Ponzi scheme would result in a fiscal crisis if at any point the requisite number of immigrants could no longer be recruited.

Even leaving aside those risks, the sheer number of immigrants required to make Social Security and Medicare solvent is unrealistic. CIS has estimated that immigration would need to rise to five times its current annual level just to maintain todays working-age share of the population through 2060.13 Even more immigration on top of that would be needed to raise the working-age share to a point where it generates a trust-fund surplus. Such a dramatic transformation of the U.S. population would cause economic, cultural, and political changes that transcend the impact on trust-fund solvency.

Rather than looking to immigration as an outside fix for the fiscal imbalances faced by Social Security and Medicare, policymakers should acknowledge that any practical solution will primarily involve a combination of tax increases and benefit reductions that encourage Americans to live within their means.

1 Online Benefits Calculator, Social Security Administration

2 Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees, A Summary of the 2023 Annual Reports, Social Security Administration.

3 Some illegal immigrants have a temporary or deferred status that entitles them to receive retirement benefits for the duration of that status. Examples include parole, DACA, and TPS. See William R. Morton and Audrey Singer, Social Security Benefits for Noncitizens, Congressional Research Service, November 17, 2016.

4 For more detail on illegal immigrants with SSNs, including those who are currently eligible for benefits through programs such as DACA, see Steven A. Camarota, Estimating the Number of Illegal Immigrants Who Might Get Covid Relief Payments, Center for Immigration Studies, March 22, 2021.

5 Stephen Goss, et. al., Effects of Unauthorized Immigration on the Actuarial Status of the Social Security Trust Funds, SSA Actuarial Note No. 151, April 2013.

6 Robert Warren and Donald Kerwin, The 2,000 Mile Wall in Search of a Purpose, Journal on Migration and Human Security, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 124-136.

7 The added revenue would not be zero, however. Since illegal immigrants tend to experience wage increases after amnesty, their payroll taxes would also be higher. This increase is far too small to offset the added cost of their benefits. See Jason Richwine, Amnesty Would Impose Large Costs on Social Security and Medicare, Center for Immigration Studies, April 5, 2021, EN11.

8 Richwine, Amnesty Would Impose Large Costs on Social Security and Medicare.

9 A present value converts a long stream of future payments into a single upfront cost, adjusting for the time value of money. In this case, an amnesty for 10 million illegal immigrants would impose the equivalent of an immediate one-time cost of $1.3 trillion on American taxpayers. The actual payments would, of course, be distributed piecemeal over many years, and the simple sum of those payments (without discounting future values) would be much more than $1.3 trillion.

10 Legal immigrants are three years older than natives on average. After netting out the effect of age, the two groups have essentially identical incomes.

11 An exception to this rule are immigrants who arrive so late in life that they are unable to obtain the 10 working years needed to qualify for Social Security and Medicare. These immigrants would not be net drains on the trust funds, although they may, of course, consume means-tested benefits, such as Medicaid.

12 The impact would be notably small. The 35 percent increase in immigration contemplated by the trustees in their high-immigration scenario would reduce the 75-year actuarial deficit by just 11 percent. See The 2023 OASDI Trustees Report, Social Security Administration, Table VI.D3.

13 Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, Projecting the Impact of Immigration on the U.S. Population, Center for Immigration Studies, February 4, 2019.

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The Impact of Immigration on Social Security and Medicare: A ... - Immigration Blog

ABC News recently announced that the Biden administration would begin conducting asylum interviews at the border. If that sounds familiar, its because the outlet is describing expedited removal, a key border-control tool Congress gave the executive branch 26 years ago and which the Biden administration has largely ignored. Unfortunately, even watered-down border enforcement is now breaking news.

Expedited Removal and Credible Fear. Expedited removal is a process that Congress created in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), to address weaknesses in border enforcement and asylum processing.

As the House Judiciary Committee explained in its committee report for what would become IIRIRA (then known as the Immigration in the National Interest Act):

Existing procedures to deny entry to and to remove illegal aliens from the United States are cumbersome and duplicative. Removal of aliens who enter the United States illegally, even those who are ordered deported after a full due process hearing, is an all-too-rare event. The asylum system has been abused by those who seek to use it as a means of backdoor immigration.

The more things change . . .

IIRIRA replaced a very convoluted and much litigated calculus for assessing the rights of aliens who had entered illegally known as the "entry doctrine" as well as what were known as "deportation" and "exclusion" proceedings with the current concepts of "removal" and "removal proceedings".

Most pertinently, Congress provided that the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) the old unified agency with jurisdiction over immigration enforcement and adjudications could process aliens without proper entry documents (including illegal entrants) via new "expedited removal" provisions in section 235(b)(1) of the INA. Expedited removal allowed INS to remove those aliens without giving them the opportunity to appear before an immigration judge (IJ).

Congress did not bar those aliens from seeking asylum, however. Rather, it added an exception to expedited removal called "credible fear, by which asylum officers (AOs) could screen potential asylum claims by aliens subject to expedited removal.

Briefly, when an alien subject to expedited removal asserts an intention to apply for asylum or a fear of persecution upon return, the alien is to be referred to an AO, who interviews the alien to assess whether theres a significant possibility, taking into account the credibility of the statements made by the alien in support of the alien's claim and such other facts as are known to the officer, that the alien could establish eligibility for asylum.

If the AO issues a positive credible fear determination (as they did 81 percent of the time between FY 2008 and the fourth quarter of FY 2019), the alien is usually placed into removal proceedings to apply for asylum.

If the AO makes a negative credible fear determination, the alien can request review of that decision by an IJ. In 2 percent of all expedited removal cases involving aliens who claimed credible fear in that FY 2008-FY 2019 timeframe, IJs reversed negative AO determinations and found credible fear.

The biggest weakness in this system is that credible fear is a screening standard, and therefore the likelihood that an illegal entrant with no asylum claim will receive a positive credible fear determination from either an AO or an IJ is high as noted, 83 percent of aliens subject to expedited removal between FY 2008 and Q4 FY 2019 passed that bar.

At the end of the day, however, just 14 percent of the border migrants who claimed credible fear were granted asylum, while nearly twice as many (27 percent) of the aliens who claimed credible fear were ordered removed in absentia when they failed to show up in immigration court.

Not that the Biden administration didnt find a way to make the problem worse.

In May, the Biden administration amended the credible fear regulations to enable AOs to adjudicate border migrants asylum claims, too not just credible fear. In an 83-page comment, the Center listed everything wrong about the plan (including that it deprived the American people a representative in the process and was highly likely to result in erroneous grants), but Biden pushed ahead anyway.

Through the end of January, 973 claims were referred to AOs for such Asylum Merits Interviews (AMIs), and as we had warned, the AO grant rate (33.5 percent) was more than double the IJ grant rate (13.8 percent in the first quarter of FY 2023) for asylum claims that had originated from a credible-fear claim by a border migrant.

Bidens Use of Expedited Removal. Again, Congress in IIRIRA created expedited removal to make it easier for the then-INS and its successor agency in border enforcement, CBP, to remove aliens entering illegally, in order to prevent border migrants from abusing the asylum system and using it as a means of backdoor immigration.

Even though the Southwest border has been overrun with a surge of illegal migrants ever since Joe Biden took office, however, use of expedited removal has been the exception, not the norm, over the past two-plus years.

For example, of the nearly 563,000 illegal migrants apprehended by Border Patrol at the Southwest border who werent expelled under Title 42 in FY 2023, fewer than 52,000 just over 9 percent were subject to expedited removal.

Why? Because its a whole lot easier and quicker for Border Patrol agents to release illegal migrants than it is to process them for expedited removal.

Of course, as Judge T. Kent Wetherell II held in his recent opinion in Florida v. U.S., its not legal for Bidens DHS to simply release those aliens, and it encourages even more aliens to cross the border illegally, but the Biden administration has shown little interest in either the strictures of the INA or border security.

What the Biden administration has been interested in up to this point is ensuring that every foreign national who can make it to this country legally or otherwise has the opportunity to apply for asylum, regardless of whether they have valid claims and despite the effects it has on the immigration court backlog.

The Administrations Reverse. Even though most Americans have little idea just how dreadful border security at the Southwest border has become, the presidents immigration policies are deeply unpopular with the American people.

In a recent Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 U.S. citizens, 55 percent of respondents disapproved of Bidens handling of immigration (39 percent strongly), compared to just 35 percent who approved (an anemic 11 percent strongly so).

Thats likely why, as ABC News reported, the presidents DHS is dusting off the expedited removal playbook. That process has become so underused of late, however, that here is how the outlet describes the new Biden plan:

Starting with a small number of migrants, asylum officers will begin holding what are known as credible fear screening interviews with those at U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities. ... The interviews are among the first steps required to make an asylum claim.

As if expedited removal was a proposal dreamed up in the West Wing last week, not a process that has been law since the Clinton administration.

That said, the administration is putting its own spin on this two-decades-plus old process. According to ABC News:

The asylum interviews will move forward as the Department of Homeland Security works to expand access to legal resources for migrants in border facilities.

...

DHS will work with legal service providers to provide access to legal services for individuals who receive credible fear interviews in CBP custody, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement.

Note that the expedited removal statute provides that an alien who is scheduled for an AO credible fear interview may consult with a person or persons of the alien's choosing prior to the interview or any review thereof, according to regulations prescribed by the Attorney General, but at no point does it require the government to make legal resources available to those aliens.

In fact, the regulation implementing that provision allows the alien to consult with a representative in advance, and to have that representative present at the interview (and to make a statement at the end), but it also makes clear: Such consultation shall be at no expense to the Government and shall not unreasonably delay the process. (Emphasis added.)

Despite that, ABC News reports that A Biden administration official stressed that border station interviews will only increase as migrants get more connected with legal service providers.

Im a lawyer and interested in justice and due process (and the continued employment of lawyers), but slow-walking the reimplementation of expedited removal until DHS works to expand access to legal resources for migrants in border facilities violates the regulation and makes no sense.

Illegal migrants pay the smugglers who bring them to the United States for a reason, and are perfectly able in almost every case to explain that reason to the AO in the credible fear interview without consulting counsel. Simply put, migrants fear persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or they dont.

The good news is Bidens DHS has rediscovered expedited removal, the tool Congress gave it to secure the border. The bad news is that the department is making that process as cumbersome as the very flawed scheme it replaced in 1996. If aliens can pay smugglers thousands of dollars to bring them here, they can pay lawyers to be ready to represent them when they arrive, without forcing taxpayers to wait and foot the bill.

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Breaking News: Biden Administration to Apply Immigration Law ... - Immigration Blog

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Two arrested for facilitation of illegal immigration - Cyprus Mail

The measure will last for six months and include the redistribution of migrants across the country and repatriations.

Italys cabinet has announced a state of emergency on immigration following a sharp rise of migrant arrivals along the countrys southern shores, a statement said, in a move aimed at better management of arrivals and repatriation facilities.

The state of emergency will last for six months and will be backed by initial funding of 5 million euros ($5.42m), according to the statement, which was issued on Tuesday.

Let it be clear, we are not solving the problem; the solution can only depend on responsible intervention by the European Union, Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci said.

The statement said that this measure was necessary to carry out with urgency extraordinary measures to reduce congestion at an overwhelmed migrant shelter on a tiny Italian island in the Mediterranean.

The government also said that the funds for this temporary emergency scheme will back new structures, suitable both for sheltering as well as the processing and repatriation of migrants who dont have the requisites to stay.

A government source told Reuters that this emergency measure will now allow Prime Minister Giorgia Melonis right-wing government to more quickly repatriate those not allowed to stay in Italy, boosting identification and expulsion orders.

According to the countrys Interior Ministry, some 31,300 migrants and refugees have arrived in Italy so far, up from around 7,900 in the same period last year.

Italys ANSA news agency reported that over the April 7-9 Easter holiday weekend, around 2,000 people arrived by boat on the Italian island of Lampedusa off the North African coast.

Over the past few months, NGOs and human rights groups have been questioning Italys stringent migration policies, over concerns that they could violate human rights.

Italian diplomat Ferdinando Nelli Feroci told Al Jazeera that this temporary emergency measure is mainly a scheme to transform illegal migration to legal migration.

I dont think this is a problem of violation of human rights. There is a distinction between people that arrive from countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea, where there is a very serious violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Those people have rights for protection and asylum, he said.

But the majority coming to Italys southern shores are economic migrants. So there is a problem of trying to manage the reception of these migrants, which the emergency scheme seeks to address, Feroci added.

Read the rest here:
Italy declares state of emergency over migration congestion - Al Jazeera English