NY Times: No Rebates for You [View All]

[marmar]

Published: May 15, 2008
Immigrant restrictionism is stiffing hundreds of thousands of American citizens and legal residents out of their tax-rebate checks.


Hard-liners were so intent on keeping the cash out of the hands of undocumented workers that they restricted the rebate to people with Social Security numbers. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, issued by the Internal Revenue Service to people who pay taxes but do not qualify for Social Security numbers, will not do. If a married couple files jointly, and one spouse is not eligible for the rebate, neither gets the money.

This hurts all manner of people who are working and paying taxes: American soldiers stationed abroad who happen to have married foreigners; high-tech immigrants in Silicon Valley and other places whose spouses are not authorized to work or have not yet had their paperwork processed. These are people who are perfectly legal, economically vital and politically inconvenient.

The government should fix the law so spouses get their money. It is a technical repair that even this Congress should manage. But why shouldn’t undocumented immigrants with taxpayer numbers get the cash too? The checks are not rewards for good behavior; they are taxes returned as a means to an end. Illegal immigrants constitute about 5 percent of the work force and earn much less than the native-born. They are just the sort of group the stimulus should be aimed at, if the purpose is to get the most economic bang for every rebate dollar.

Arguments like that do not fly in the polluted atmosphere of immigration politics, which has produced toxic byproducts so extreme that they make the rebate glitch seem like a mere annoyance. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/opinion/15thu1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin