Paying Illegals to Stay

IRS Gives Out Billions Each Year

By David North October 2013

To crib from Caesar, all immigration policy is divided into three parts: you can enforce the law and deport the illegals, you can ignore them (and there is a lot of that going around), or you can pay them to stay in this country.

Not even the White House is publicly advocating the third option, but recently the Treasury took exactly that approach, and sent $4.2 billion to families of illegal aliens, as CIS reported in blog at the time.1

Why and how this came to pass is an unusual story with a plethora of players — including two heroes — about how our government works and how faceless, midlevel decision-makers can, and do, shape our basic policies. And how the courts are, in effect, powerless to do anything about it.

This particular paying-the-illegals-to-stay pattern revolves around the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), which is not so much a tax credit as it is an income-transfer program for low-income families, offering up to $1,000 per child to all resident families, including those of illegal aliens. The Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration estimated that $4.2 billion had been sent in ACTC checks to families of illegal aliens in a single tax season.

The story of this scandal involves these ingredients:

• A fuzzy-minded Congress;


• An almost casual policy decision by IRS to make these payments to illegals;


• A still lower-level decision by IRS that made it easy for applicants to submit phony documents to support applications for ACTCs;


• Other practices by IRS making it easy for illegals to get big refunds in this program;


• A remarkable journalistic intervention in Indianapolis that broke the story;


• A highly useful set of reports by a Treasury Department inspector general; and


• A half-hearted, needlessly narrow effort by IRS to clean up at least part of its act.

This is one of those perfect-storm situations, in which a whole series of factors come together to cause the problem, in this case shelling out billions to help illegal aliens stay in the United States.

Read more:

http://cis.org/paying-illeglas-to-stay