Social Security for immigrants: at President Bush's behest, plans have been created, and are being implemented, for a "totalization agreement" with Mexico--which would give U.S. Social Security benefits to millions of Mexican citizens.

When Social Security was created in the 1930s, intelligent observers said it would fail.

Its first recipient, Ida Fuller, contributed less than $25. After 35 years of retirement, Fuller died, having pocketed nearly $25,000. Not a bad return. At the program's inception, numerous workers paid into the program compared to the number of people receiving benefits. That's the situation no longer. With baby boomers retiring soon and the so-called trust fund filled with IOUs, the Social Security system is headed for disaster.

Now President Bush wants to add a few million people to the rolls of Social Security. Adding more Americans would be bad enough. But Presidente Arbusto wants to bring Mexican citizens onto its rolls, most of them now illegal aliens.

The president's position is hardly surprising, given his amnesty plan for illegals and the not-so-secret blueprint for melding the United States, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union that would erase American citizenship and sovereignty. But perhaps the effrontery of the idea, which slaps the face of every real American who involuntarily contributes to Social Security, will sink this ship before it sails.

"Totalization"

Illegal aliens would receive Social Security under an agreement hatched in 2004, awaiting the signature of Bush, similar to agreements the United States has signed with many countries. These pacts, all of them unconstitutional, of course, are called "totalization agreements." They permit an American living abroad, or foreign worker living here, to escape the double taxation that would occur if he paid into each country's government retirement plan. As well, the agreement permits a person to "totalize" his social security payments into each country's program if he never worked in one country long enough to qualify for benefits from either.

The United States maintains totalization agreements with many countries, almost all of them European. Now, the president wants to sign a totalization agreement with Mexico. Problem is, the relationship between the United States and Mexico is of a different breed than that between the United States and Europe.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the idea of giving Social Security to illegal immigrants is not new; the totalization agreement would merely escalate the giveaway to a grand scale. Social Security already views some illegal aliens as it does any other American, as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports. The Social Security Administration "permits foreign nationals to work many years illegally with one or more fraudulently obtained Social Security numbers, acquire legal status (e.g. through an amnesty or marriage to a U.S. citizen), obtain a valid SSN, and then request that his or her prior earnings credits be moved to the new number." Prior to 2004, before Congress banned the practice, illegals could return home and collect Social Security legally.

Totalization would undermine that ban, immigration analyst Ed Rubenstein reported, because the 2004 law contains a loophole for illegals from countries with which the United States has totalization agreements. Those illegals could collect Social Security, which offers one reason the elites want the agreement: they can skirt the congressional ban. But again, illegals from other countries differ markedly from Mexico's in important respects: millions of militant Finns, Swedes, and Germans are neither here illegally nor agitating for per mission to come here; and European countries have social security plans on par with ours, unlike Mexico--meaning we get to foot Mexico's retirement bills.

As for the agreement itself, a pact with Mexico undermines even the concept of totalization, which assumes that a foreign corporation sends a worker to the United States, and that the foreign corporation and workers have contributed to the person's home-country social security account. "After working a limited number of years abroad," CIS observes, "workers return to their home country and resume paying social security taxes, eventually vesting for benefits based upon their combined work history in both countries. In almost all of the existing totalization agreements, U.S. workers and their employers benefit as much or more than those in the counterpart nation."

This wouldn't be true with Mexico. Most Mexicans came here illegally on their own. A company did not send them. They don't go home voluntarily, and the federal government won't deport them. And, CIS reports, the poverty-stricken Mexicans here never paid into their social security system, which does not, in any case, cover most Mexicans. About 40 percent of Mexicans participate. For all intents and purposes, this means Mexicans would receive nearly 100 percent of their social security benefits from the United States because "workers vest for Social Security in the United States after working only 10 years (40 quarters), while it takes fully 24 years to vest in the Mexican program." And some would qualify after working just a few years.

Yet another significant difference between Mexican and American social security is that Mexico's plan pays out only what a worker contributes; the American system pays until a person dies. Remember Ida Fuller. Again, even without a totalization agreement, Social Security is a magnet for illegal aliens. The agreement would strengthen that magnet.

And this raises the question of numbers. Ten percent of Mexico's population lives in the United States, almost all of them illegal. Estimates of the number of illegal aliens range from 12 million to 20 million, so amnesty or guest-worker programs mean adding millions of new customers to our bankrupt federal retirement program.

In other words, all the benefits of totalization accrue to Mexicans. And that means illegal aliens.

The Cost

Even worse, the federal General Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Social Security Administration calculated the wisdom of signing a totalization agreement with Mexico, figuratively speaking, on the back of an envelope. American officials were clueless about and never seriously evaluated the Mexican social security system to determine how it functions or even whether it was solvent.

GAO estimated that totalization would cost $78 million its first year and $650 million annually by 2050, but CIS warned that GAO's estimates were flawed because the agency used the figures from Canada's totalization agreement with the United States to forecast the cost of an agreement with Mexico. Problem is, most Canadians are not here illegally, and 10 percent of Canada's population does not live here.

Reported CIS, "The SSA did not take into account the millions of unauthorized Mexican workers currently in the United States who could gain legal status through an amnesty. Not only they but their families--who may never have lived in the United States--could be eligible to receive U.S. Social Security benefits after the worker returned to Mexico. Nor did SSA factor in the possibility that the promise of Social Security benefits would lure even more Mexicans to enter the United States illegally." Those Mexicans, of course, would smuggle in their families.

No wonder so many congressmen and senators oppose totalization, and no wonder the Social Security Administration refused to release the agreement for three years until a senior-citizens group forced it to do so using the Freedom of Information Act. This last fact should tell Americans everything they need to know.

If Bush signs the totalization agreement with Mexico and his amnesty or guest-worker plans go through, illegal aliens would claim as much as they can through work done illegally but suddenly "legalized," then pack their families across the border to latch on to the taxpayers' teat. Others would jump the border to feed at the trough. But that's exactly what the political elites want.