I wrote this a few days ago:

If we’re going to travel down this line of thinking, it seems that there is another key Democratic constituency that is being left out on the cold.

Illegal immigrants pay some level of taxes with stolen social security numbers, they certainly receive services from the government in their times of need, and if the trend of undocumented driver’s licenses and no ID at voting booths continues, they’ll assuredly be the next big voter bonanza for the left. Why, you can even ask stalwart conservative John McCain, and he’ll tell you that they’re an integral part of our economy. Everyone else (except for the people who actually pay the bulk of the taxes) are getting in on the economic band-aid, so why aren’t we throwing them a little extra cash to help boost things? If we don’t, we might have to pick our country’s lettuce ourselves for $50 an hour. Now that would be disastrous!

And here comes this from Politico.

But late Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee was scrambling to fix the problem _ contained in the House bill _ by only allowing taxpayers using legitimate Social Security numbers to receive rebates.

The text of the House passed bill contains language making “non resident aliens” _ illegal immigrants _ ineligible for the tax rebates. But every year, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants use individual taxpayer identification numbers, known as ITINs, to file income tax returns with the IRS. These ID numbers are used instead of Social Security numbers. There are no exact statistics for how many illegal immigrants file tax returns, but this New York Times story from last year details the significant increase in use of ITINs.  This story also lays out the issue.

Immigration advocates point out that many legal immigrants use ITINs, so it would be impossible to tell who is legal and who is not from those who use these IDs. The Senate version of the bill would prohibit use of ITINs, meaning some legal immigrants would not receive rebates.

Now that’s what I call absurd political news.

Others on this: Michelle Malkin | Big Dogs Weblog | The Corner | Political Vindication | Conservative Outpost | D=S |

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 12:54 am and is filed under Economy, Immigration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.