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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by archetypal fool
You seem to have missed an interesting post above by dc_dux. Check out his source, I learned things I didn't know before.
If you want to continue to hold onto the notion that illegal immigrants cost tax dollars, realize that they are being deducted from pay checks, just like yours and mines. So your hotel analogy implies that people come here and just take everything (parasites), when in fact they're contributing back. Where as in my analogy, work is done and there's an exchange between labor and money.
And as for your most recent analogy, I'll emphasize again that sneaking into this country IS ILLEGAL. Anyone caught doing is is braking the law. I'm not arguing for/against punishment for the act. Nor am I implying that it's any more legal for one situation than it is for another. But I'm not going to sit around and let some people continue regarding illegal immigrants as parasites, or a shit of a people, or selfish entities withing the country, or people who want to change this country to give them better benefits, or any thing like that, because simply, I don't believe this is the case.
So to explicitly answer your question, both should be punished equally.
I can see where you can use my previous "morality" argument for this case, since using the "morality" argument, you'd expect me to say that the criminal doing it to save his starving family is somewhat justified. This isn't the case though. Mugging someone is directly affecting that person, and hurting that person. My previous "morality" argument only holds water if the person is acting morally (as is usually the case with those who choose to come here illegally).
Therefor, if I was mugged by the latter mugger from you analogy, it isn't justified. It's directly stealing, which isn't the case with illegal immigration.
That's correct. According to my family, I learned English in less than a year (I came when I was 3 yrs old). I've been the family translator ever since. Most of my family already knows English, but they rather have me take care of their dirty work since I'm so much more comfortable with the language than they are.
Children are much more capable of learning languages. They have a propensity for it, in fact. In Matt Ridley's book "Genome", he sites a particularly interesting case where children, when brought up in a situation where many different languages are used frequently by people who don't speak them all (imagine an island with 1000 people, 20% English, 20% Spanish, 20% Arabic, 20% Asian, and 20% African, all interacting together daily...The case was similar), synthesized a more efficient language, composed of all the languages. Each generation created a better and better language. It's truly amazing.
For the same reason, it's harder for adults to learn things like languages. The proverbial roots have already been anchored.
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re: those that are paying taxes is patently FALSE for a good portion of those illegal immigrants. Those that are paying taxes are using STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, committing yet ANOTHER CRIME of identity theft. Yes, they have taxes taken out of the wages being paid and leaving someone else holding the bag. I have known a couple people who were left having to pay ADDITIONAL taxes on monies because of someone else using their social security number for employment. The example below is just one case of many.
Furthermore, there are many day laborers and other workers who get paid CASH, who won't go out and get any documentation, they too do not pay payroll taxes, while they may pay sales tax on good purchased, they don't pay property taxes which goes to pay for education in most districts.
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Illegal Worker, Troubled Citizen and Stolen Name
LINK
JULIA PRESTON
MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — The two women named Violeta Blanco have never met. But for a long time they shared not only a name, but the same birth date and the same Social Security number.
One is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who went to work slicing pork in a meat-packing plant here after her husband left her with three children. The other is a single American mother in California who has never held a job, struggles with drug addiction and is fighting to keep the state from taking her children.
With little in common but their shared identity, the two women are unwittingly linked by an illicit trade that is the focus of a new federal crackdown on illegal immigration. Detained in a recent raid on the Iowa plant, the Mexican worker admitted that she had used the California woman’s identity to get her job. Now she is in jail on felony charges of identity theft, her trial set to begin in Des Moines on Monday.
Immigration raids at six Swift & Company meat-packing plants in six states in December, as well as more recent sweeps in Michigan, Florida and Arizona, have exposed an expanding front in the underground business that caters to illegal immigrants looking for work, officials say.
As the authorities have aggressively prosecuted employers for hiring undocumented workers, companies are examining applicants more carefully, and fake documents no longer pass inspection as easily as they did. Illegal immigrants have turned increasingly to bona fide documents, stolen or bought by traffickers from actual Americans.
With scrutiny tightening, illegal immigrants “invest more effort and money into getting better documents,” said Julie L. Myers, the top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “More and more, that includes taking on the identities of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.”
The case of Violeta Blanco, 31, of Bakersfield, Calif., and the woman in Iowa who used her name, Eloisa Nuñez Galeana, 32, provides a rare view of the new identity trade through hard lives on both ends.
On one side is an immigrant who is eager to work and who says she never thought she could be stealing from a real person; on the other is an American down on her luck who says she does not know how her personal information came to be exchanged on the black market.
Continued click to show
Interviewed in jail in Des Moines, Ms. Nuñez said she used Ms. Blanco’s documents — which she had purchased from a woman she did not know — in 2003 to apply for her job at Swift, but that she never used them again.
She had hoped to work at the plant for many years, she said, perhaps long enough to see her children, who range in age from 2 to 15, graduate from high school (two were born in Iowa and are American citizens).
“I was innocent when I came from Mexico,” said Ms. Nuñez, a petite, round-faced woman who said she was devastated to find herself in a criminal lock-up. “But they don’t give you a job so easily anymore. To get honest work, you need good documents.”
While Ms. Nuñez worked at the Swift plant pushing sides of pork into a saw that sliced off the fat, Ms. Blanco was in her hometown of Bakersfield leading a life teeming with trouble. She had been in rehabilitation to shake an addiction to the drug known as PCP. She had lost custody of her children to the state child welfare authorities, and then had regained it.
As a result, Ms. Blanco said she was distracted and paid little attention to letters three years ago from the Social Security Administration ordering her to report the employment income showing up under her number. She had never been close to taking a job.
“I don’t know the person, but I’m upset,” Ms. Blanco said of Ms. Nuñez. “I think she could get more benefit from me, from my identity, than I could from her. ”
A Market for Authenticity
Of 1,282 illegal immigrants detained in the Swift raids, the majority were charged with civil immigration violations and quickly deported. But federal prosecutors brought identity-theft charges against 148 of the workers.
Court papers show that the accused did not use stolen documents to loot bank accounts or credit cards, the primary crimes that identity-theft laws seek to attack. Instead, they used the birth certificates and Social Security cards to get jobs.
Still, Matthew C. Allen, the senior investigations official at Immigration and Custom Enforcement, said that 326 Americans had reported financial complications and tax liabilities from having their identities used at Swift. “The victims have suffered very real consequences,” Mr. Allen said.
At Swift, the workers had Social Security contributions and other taxes deducted from their paychecks, but they did not file tax returns. The Social Security taxes accumulated in the accounts of the real owners. Because the documents were real, Swift managers were not alerted to any irregularities by the Social Security Administration, and no charges were brought against the company in connection with the raids.
Traffickers have devised several ways to meet the demand for authentic documents. Along the Mexican border, immigration officials said, muggers and pickpockets have learned that selling stolen documents to black market vendors can be less risky than a shopping spree with a stolen credit card.
Some Americans willingly sell their documents.
In Corpus Christi, Tex., this month, seven people pleaded guilty to selling their birth certificates and Social Security cards for as little as $100 for both. In another recent case, immigration officials said, an employee of a Michigan state employment bureau sold confidential identity information from state records to illegal immigrants seeking jobs.
A significant number of documents purchased by the immigrants here belonged to Americans, like Ms. Blanco, who were born and lived in Bakersfield, 115 miles north of Los Angeles. A number of those Americans lived at one time within blocks of each other in the same Latino neighborhood in Bakersfield, though at this point there is no explanation as to how their documents wound up on the black market.
Traffickers apparently sold and resold the documents in several places. Many of the identities found in Marshalltown, including Ms. Blanco’s, had also been used by immigrant workers in Green Forest, Ark., and Milwaukee, Wis. Neither Ms. Nuñez nor Ms. Blanco has ever been to either place, they said.
Ms. Nuñez said she was reluctant to use identity documents that did not belong to her, but she said she did not know that she could be committing a federal offense, since buying documents was routine among illegal immigrants here.
Real Documents for $800
She said she first came to Iowa a decade ago, joining a sister and brother who were both longtime legal residents married to United States citizens. Despite her family ties, no legal work visa was available for Ms. Nuñez, or for many other Mexican and Central American immigrants who flocked to Marshalltown in recent years, drawn by the jobs at Swift.
Ms. Nuñez said that after her third child was born, her husband, who was also Mexican, abandoned the family. She put out the word that she needed a steady job. Friends told her that fake documents would not be good enough to apply at Swift because the company’s vetting was thorough.
Before long, a Mexican woman she did not know knocked on her door. Ms. Nuñez said she paid the woman $800 for official copies of Ms. Blanco’s birth certificate and Social Security card.
The Marshalltown Swift plant, which employs 2,220, was always hiring, and Ms. Nuñez went to work at the standard starting wage of $11.50 an hour. The work was wearing, she said, but the pay was good.
“The line moves fast, and they want the work well done,” said Ms. Nuñez, speaking Spanish (she does not speak English). “After a while, I was on top of it. I did it because I had to.”
The immigration agents who raided the plant on Dec. 12 released many of the illegal immigrants who were single parents. Ms. Nuñez was among the exceptions.
María Barajas, Ms. Nuñez’s sister who lives 20 miles from the plant, said Ms. Nuñez called her from jail, “nervous, crying, her voice was shaking.”
Mrs. Barajas, who has two sons of her own, has been taking care of Ms. Nuñez’s children. The two oldest have grown up attending Marshalltown public schools; the youngest is 2. To support them, Mrs. Barajas said she had taken a job at Swift.
At the mention of her children during an interview in Des Moines, Ms. Nuñez, hunched in a gray-and-white striped jail uniform, began to cry.
“I risked everything so they could grow up in the United States,” she said. “I’m only asking for permission to do honest work.”
Ms. Nuñez and several other immigrant women detained in the Iowa raid who have children who are American citizens say they have resolved to fight the charges against them rather than make a deal with prosecutors that would lead to their deportation with no chance of legal return.
“She’s a mother who cut my pork chops and gave Social Security a lot of money,” said Michael H. Said, a lawyer representing Ms. Nuñez. “She deserves a medal, not an indictment.”
In a similar the case, a Des Moines jury this month disagreed. Lorena Andrade Rodríguez, 34, an illegal Mexican immigrant working at Swift, was convicted of identity theft on March 7. Ms. Andrade is appealing the verdict.
“I’m not a bad person,” she said. “My record is clean. My only mistake was to do hard work in someone else’s name.”
Tracing a Name to Its Source
In Bakersfield, Ms. Blanco cast a glance around her disheveled bungalow, clogged with crates of toys and clothes, and admitted there were many ways her documents could have slipped away. She said she did not sell them.
“I mean, I’m not organized,” said Ms. Blanco, who lives on Social Security payments for a psychological disability. “I just throw stuff here, throw stuff there. Or I’m not here, stuff has been stolen. Or I moved. Most of it was that stuff got lost when I moved around.”
Ms. Blanco also said her purse had been stolen several times by one of her sons. Iowa court records show that replacements for Ms. Blanco’s Social Security card were ordered 20 times over the last decade. Ms. Blanco said she could not remember requesting all the new cards.
She said that her father was a convicted cocaine dealer and one of her sons was arrested for assault when he was 9, and now, three years later, lives in a juvenile home. She has been arrested for petty theft, assault and drug use, and was once sentenced to three months in jail.
Waving a file of wrinkled papers that she keeps in a cellophane bag, she said that Ms. Nuñez’s employment under her name was only a small part of problems she attributed to identity theft.
She said she had difficulty renewing her driver’s license because someone else using her identity had taken out a license in Arkansas. A bank where she tried to open an account told her that it already had one in her name in another state — not Iowa.
“I know that when I get ready, I’m going to get everything all filed up, and I’m going to try to take care of it,” Ms. Blanco said. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to try.”
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Another article re: stolen SSI numbers used for employment
Quote:
Some ID Theft Is Not for Profit, But to Get a Job; STOLEN LIVES: The Crucial Number
LINK
Camber Lybbert thought it was a mistake when her bank said her daughter's Social Security number was on the bank's files for two credit cards and two auto loans, with an outstanding balance of more than $25,000. Her daughter is 3 years old.
For Lybbert and her husband, Tyson, the call began a five-month scramble trying to clear up their daughter's credit record. As it turned out, an illegal immigrant named Jose Tinoco had stolen their daughter's Social Security number, not in pursuit of a financial crime but to get a job.
"From what I've picked up, he wasn't using it maliciously," Camber Lybbert said. "He was using it to have a job, to get a car, provide for his family. My husband's like, 'Don't you feel bad, you've ruined this guy's life?' But at the same time, he's ruined the innocence of her Social Security number because when she goes to apply for loans, she's going to have this history."
Though most people think of identity theft as a financial crime, one of the most common forms involves illegal immigrants using fraudulent Social Security numbers to conduct their daily lives. With tacit acceptance from some employers and poor coordination among government agencies, the practice provides the backbone of some low-wage businesses and a boon to the Social Security trust fund. During the 1990s, such mismatches accounted for about $20 billion in Social Security taxes paid.
"It's clear that it is a different intent or purpose than trying to get someone's MasterCard and charge it up, knowing they're going to get the bill," said Richard Hamp, an assistant attorney general in Utah. "But it has some similarities. It goes on the other person's credit record. Illegals are filing for bankruptcy using someone else's number. I had one 78-year-old with three defaults on houses she never owned."
The Federal Trade Commission estimates that 10 million Americans have their identities stolen each year.
Illegal immigrants make up nearly one of every 20 workers in America, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center, and most are working under fraudulent Social Security numbers, which can be bought in any immigrant community or in Mexico.
In Caldwell, Idaho, a woman named Maria is just such a worker.
Maria, 51, came from Mexico City illegally six years ago and bought a counterfeit green card and Social Security card through a friend for $180. She earns $6.50 an hour, and like most of the seven million working illegal immigrants in the United States, she pays income tax and Social Security tax. She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name not be used.
''We know we'll never get it back,'' Maria said of the Social Security payments. ''It's unfortunate, but it's a given.''
Like most victims of identity theft, the Lybberts did not lose any money in the long run. But Camber Lybbert estimated that for four or five months she spent 30 hours or more a week making telephone calls, feeling passed from one agency or voice-mail system to another: the Social Security Administration; the attorney general; the three credit bureaus that issue credit ratings; and police departments in two cities.
''Everyone I talked to handed me off to someone else, saying that's not our department, call this number,'' she said. ''I was being led in a circle.''
The Social Security Administration each year receives 8 million to 9 million earnings reports from the Internal Revenue Service filed under names that do not match the Social Security numbers. Some are from workers whose employers botched their personnel forms or women who recently changed their names after marriage. Others are from people using a Social Security number that is not their own.
"It's basically a subsidy from migrant workers to the aggregate of American taxpayers," said Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton who studies Mexican migration.
Though no one knows how many of these mismatches are illegal immigrants, a Government Accountability Office study found that employers with the most mismatches were concentrated in industries that hire a lot of illegal immigrants, including agriculture, construction and food services.
"Right now, employers are not motivated to care if their workers give them false Social Security numbers," said Barbara Bovbjerg, the office's director of education, workforce and income security issues.
The Social Security Administration is legally barred from sharing information with immigration or law enforcement agencies or from telling the rightful owner of a Social Security number that someone else is working under their number, said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman.
The rightful owner of a stolen number does not get the benefits accrued under its false use.
Ms. Bovbjerg's office and others have called for better cooperation among the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security to prosecute workers who use false Social Security numbers and the companies that hire them.
"We've had this ridiculous situation where, theoretically, this information could be shared and we could identify these people and repair the situation," said Marti Dinerstein, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit organization that supports tighter restrictions on immigration. "Falsely using a Social Security number is a felony. ... The IRS says privacy laws prevent them from sharing information. So we know who the guilty employers are. The IRS knows who the guilty employees are. And nothing's being done about it."
In 2000, using Social Security Administration data, the Utah attorney general's office found that there were 132,000 people in the state whose Social Security numbers were being used by other people, far more than the state could prosecute.
This use caused problems even when the person using the number led a financially responsible life, said Hamp, the assistant attorney general.
"I've had families denied public assistance for their children or disability payments because records show somebody is working in their Social Security number," he said.
Scott Smith of Ogden, Utah, discovered that someone was using his daughter Bailey's Social Security number when he applied for public health insurance for her.
Like Lybbert, he has mixed feelings about what happened next.
"All that was happening was that the illegal alien who had gotten the card had gotten a job at a Sizzler steakhouse in Provo and was paying her bills and doing a good job," he said. "My opinion was, hey, we've got someone hard-working who's come from Mexico, who just wants to get a leg up -- give her Bailey's Social Security number and issue us a new one. ...
"But they arrested her. I actually feel bad about her being deported."
In immigrant communities, most counterfeiters invent Social Security numbers at random, choosing only the first three digits to signal the card's state of origin, prosecutors and investigators say.
When the numbers belong to children, the problems can start when they turn 18, said Jay Foley, a founder and director of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, a nonprofit organization that helps victims and proposes legislation. ''Now the child goes for student loans or jobs, and the companies say, 'You've got a problem of bad credit. We aren't going to touch you.' ''
Most affected, Mr. Foley said, are foster children who are suddenly independent at 18.
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I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.
Last edited by Cynthetiq; 04-05-2007 at 05:37 AM..
Reason: Automerged Doublepost
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