Although our southern border is officially “closed,” that’s not stopping hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants from crossing it and declaring themselves candidates for asylum. What’s more, there are maybe 30 million of them here already. And it just so happens that right now, as directed by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the Biden government is handing out cash stimulus payments from the nearly two thousand million dollars authorized, to everyone with a Social Security number.
There’s the catch, of course, the way the Democrats tell it. Illegals don’t have SS numbers. So said Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) during the debate over the Covid relief bill, stating “Undocumented immigrants do not have Social Security numbers, and they do not qualify for stimulus relief checks.”
A new analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies finds that Durbin is incorrect. CIS estimates that perhaps 2.65 million illegal immigrants do have Social Security numbers and that the vast majority (2.1 million) have incomes low enough to qualify for checks. In addition, those 2.1 million have 1.1 million U.S.-born dependent children, also eligible. All told, Uncle Sam is on the hook to pay up to $4.38 billion of the Biden cash out to households of persons in this country illegally.
To obtain their estimates, CIS used numerous official government reports. The 2.65 million illegals with SS numbers come from the following categories:
- Asylum applicants
- DACA recipients
- Aliens with Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
- Miscellaneous groups of individuals with Employment Authorization Documents (EADs)
- Aliens with stolen SS cards (Amazingly, there may be 700,000 of these!)
Finally, the CIS asks, “Does the IRS actually prevent illegals from getting checks?”
Although tools–such as SAVE and Numident–exist that could help weed out a significant number of illegal immigrants from receiving payments, the IRS does not use them. So, in answer to the question, No.
For more, see CIS.org.