Crist: Create a "Pathway to Citizenship"
Amanda Terkel reports:
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running as an independent for the state's U.S. Senate seat, is arguing that one of the nation's toughest problems -- extending the solvency of Social Security -- can be tackled by taking on another controversy: creating a pathway to citizenship for the nation's undocumented immigrants.
"Studies show that 11-14 million people are in the country as non-citizens, and if we are willing to have a thoughtful, reasonable pathway to citizenship -- earning citizenship -- then those 11-14 million people can become productive, participating members of the American economy, paying the payroll taxes, helping Social Security going forward, and making America stronger financially," Crist told The Huffington Post in an interview on Friday.
Crist is not the first person to point to the ties between immigration and Social Security. In April, Robert Reich, former labor secretary under President Clinton, wrote that because America is aging so fast, the country is now paying out more in benefits than it is taking in. "This is where immigration comes in," he stated. "Most immigrants are young because the impoverished countries they come from are demographically the opposite of rich countries. ... Get it? One logical way to deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States."
Social Security actuaries estimate that in 2007, two-thirds of undocumented workers, or 5.6 million people, were paying into the system, while far fewer were receiving any benefits. "If for example we had not had other-than-legal immigrants in the country over the past, then these numbers suggest that we would have entered persistent shortfall of tax revenue to cover [payouts] starting [in] 2009, or six years earlier than estimated under the 2010 Trustees Report," said Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration.
Virtually no one, however, is proposing keeping millions of people in the United States with undocumented status simply so they can pay into the system while getting very little in return. The alternatives are widespread deportation -- which would reduce U.S. GDP by 1.46 percent, according to findings by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) -- or comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship.
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