The narrative being pushed by the left about illegal aliens is that they’re just “hard-working, law-abiding” people with families to support who only want what American citizens want.
The reality is far different. Most illegal aliens are able to get jobs in the United States using stolen identification.
This is not a “victimless crime.” People’s lives are turned upside down and sometimes permanently ruined by having their Social Security numbers stolen.
The Free Press investigated the case of Austin Yeazel, a 27-year-old father of three children living in Middletown, Ohio. Yeazel has been out of work for a year, after applying for more than 50 positions, including dishwasher and portable toilet cleaner. He was denied when he tried to renew his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The bureaucrat helping him informed him that he wasn’t eligible because his Social Security number indicated that he had earned nearly $90,000 that year from two different jobs.
Yeazel found two tax forms with his Social Security number on them, but with different addresses. One of the companies that Yeazel was supposed to have worked for told the IRS that it “did have an associate working for us with the name Austin Yeazel” but that a “thorough investigation” showed that the worker “was not the gentlemen [sic] involved” in the SNAP request made by the authentic Yeazel.
The man’s life had been hijacked by a broker who sold his Social Security number to at least two illegal aliens.
“My big fear is this whole thing ruining my life,” Yeazel told The Free Press. He stands to lose his health insurance, which he desperately needs to supply his son with medicine for his ADHD and his wife’s diabetes medication. “We’re looking at losing it all,” Yeazel said, “It’s my life they’re playing with, and it’s not fair.”
But at least the illegal alien who stole his identity and upended his life was “hard-working.” He sure as hell wasn’t law-abiding, was he?
The reality is that hiring illegal immigrants in low-paying, backbreaking jobs became so routine and widespread in America that immigration-related identity theft was often ignored or accepted, especially since it is a nonviolent crime. “The person is an illegal immigrant worker looking for a job. The employer wants to hire them for a job,” said Alex Nowrasteh, an economic policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Nobody’s going to report it.”
The government also chose not to use a powerful tool to fight the problem. During the Barack Obama and Joe Biden presidential administrations, the Social Security Administration stopped sending out “no-match letters,” which alert employers about discrepancies between the information that an employer provides to the agency about an employee and the employee’s information in the agency’s records.
How many times has this maddening scenario been repeated in the U.S.?
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that supports reduced immigration, estimated that there were about a million instances of stolen identification and fraudulent Social Security numbers in 2023 alone. The Social Security Administration’s chief actuary reported in 2013 that 1.8 million illegal immigrants worked under Social Security numbers that did not match their names.
Federal documents obtained in 2018 by the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a conservative nonprofit group, reported 39 million instances from 2012 to 2016 where the names listed on W-2 forms did not match the corresponding Social Security records, though the number of people linked to those mismatches was likely far smaller.
Any costs associated with having illegal aliens in the United States must start with the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and legal aliens whose identities have been stolen and used by illegal aliens to work. Restarting the practice of sending “no match” letters by the Social Security Administration to employers, while at the same time, stiffening the costs to businesses for knowingly hiring illegal aliens, would be a good start in addressing the problem.
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