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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

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It’s crazy to still use a dehumanizing term like illegals when referring to people holding up large segments of the economy while being illegally underpaid by employers. Not even in a politically correct sense, it’s such an obviously propagandized term that I’m surprised people are still gullible enough to use it.

Are you usually this concerned about negligible amounts of taxes not being collected, or only when it concerns some of the most powerless, exploited, and hardworking people in our communities?

I only ask so future historians can better understand the rhetoric used to justify the nakedly authoritarian kidnapping and imprisonment of Latinos and political opponents.

> It's hilarious that the dashboard is claiming that illegals pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else

The dashboard is explicitly not doing that. They cite, and use numbers from, research reports that explicitly estimate the taxes that illegal immigrants pay.

You can disagree with their analysis, but they are not making the assumption you are claiming they are making.

I don’t actually see the where the dashboard claims that the average tax rate is the same as the larger population.

The dashboard does say that undocumented immigrants pay

> an average tax revenue rate of 29.5%, supported by various sources [3, 4, 5, 6]

without saying anything about the average tax rate for the whole population.

Typical ‘illegals’ (aka laborers, line workers) IF they’re paid a W2 payroll, certainly do pay taxes like everyone else. They’ll generally never be able to actually draw down that SS tax, etc. they’re paying in, however.

The SSA could easily stop this, but isn’t interested in doing so. They’ll happily go after folks trying to get payments out however.

Being paid under the table is of course different, but then that is as much the employer as anyone else eh?

I'd be in favor of a constitutional amendment which guarantees the right to vote if you're paying taxes. It's what we fought for during the revolutionary war, it ought to be law.

Considering the current political threats involve threatening to deport a born and raised US citizens because they irritate the President, I expect it may take awhile for that to be proposed.

Agreed, it's for when the pendulum is on the other side.

In every country there is a $ income level where you move from a net drain on the government to a source of tax revenue. The sort of job that looks the other way to employee illegal immigrants would not be the sort of job that pays enough money to be a net benefit in tax revenue.

That would be accurate, if those immigrants could access benefits in order to be a drain on the government. They can't.

Thats always the claim, but they have stolen SSN's to get those jobs in the first place (those without SSN's aren't paying income tax).

Not to mention states like California which explicitly spend federal money on illegal immigrants through Medicaid.

Generally true - if not stolen, then they would need to lie on the SSN appliation (no permission to work, but some other approved purpose, but then use it when working). It would be easy to cross-reference SS/IRS tax records on this front too. [https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/ss5doc.htm#work2].

They have to have those stolen SSNs (or one acquired fraudulently) to get on a W2 payroll, and there is no legal way to get a SSN like that if you aren’t here legally. SS and federal programs explicitly go after anyone with those stolen SSNs if they try to withdraw funds. I imagine California is not as friendly to it either, if you really dig in. But they happily accept contributions.

And it would be trivial to modify the system so those folks couldn’t get on the payroll in the first place by requiring new employee information be submitted and verified to prevent this - last I checked it was actually explicitly illegal to do that however. Though the data is required to be kept handy in case of a raid/inspection by ICE by the employer.

I don’t think anyone is claiming being here illegally is GOOD. Rather that the system benefits from doing things that way (in the sense of illegal folks paying in, and generally unable to withdraw), and things are structured to enable this at the benefit of companies, the US gov’t, etc.

‘illegals’ as far as I can tell are definitely not sitting at home fat on SS benefits. Rather the opposite.

> Thats always the claim, but they have stolen SSN's to get those jobs in the first place (those without SSN's aren't paying income tax).

Where are the criminal prosecutions if that is actually happening? For all of Elon's efforts, even he was unable to find much (if any?) social security fraud.

> Not to mention states like California which explicitly spend federal money on illegal immigrants through Medicaid.

With the exception of pregnancy and emergency care (which are relatively minor), this is not the case.

People get prosecuted for stealing SSN’s all the time (identity theft), just generally not for paying in taxes under said SSN. The gov’t loves free money.

  at the same rate as everyone else

I know plenty of Americans who do this so that tracks. Gonna have to find another metric to use to validate your morally bankrupt position.

Referencing 'videos by contractors' as your evidence suggests an embarrassing relationship to epistemology in the era of sociometrics.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topic/tax-contrib...

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