Agency responds—sort of
What does the IRS have to say about all this?
The agency sent WTHR a statement, defending its policy of paying tax credits to illegal immigrants.
“The law has been clear for over a decade that eligibility for these credits does not depend on work authorization status or the type of taxpayer identification number used. Any suggestion that the IRS shouldn’t be paying out these credits under current law to ITIN holders is simply incorrect. The IRS administers the law impartially and applies it as it is written,” the statement said.
George disagrees with that position and believes the IRS should be doing more to prevent undocumented workers from getting billions in US tax dollars.
“The IRS is not doing something as simple as requesting sufficient documentation from people seeking this credit,” he said. “Once the money goes out the door, it’s nearly impossible for the IRS to get it back.”
Over the past month, WTHR has tried to ask the IRS more questions about its efforts to prevent abuse involving additional child tax credits.
Despite repeated phone calls, e-mails and a visit to IRS headquarters in Washington, the agency said none of its 100,000 employees had time to meet with 13 Investigates for an interview. An IRS spokeswoman said all staff were too busy because of the tax filing deadline in mid-April.
Apparently, the IRS doesn’t have time to respond to some tax preparers, either.
Last year, our whistleblower noticed dozens of undocumented workers had used phony documents and false income to claim tax credits. He reported all of it to the IRS.
“These were fraudulent, 100% fraudulent tax returns, but I got no response; absolutely none. We never heard a thing,” he said. “To me, it’s clear the IRS is letting this happen.”
The IRS tells WTHR it can do nothing to change the current system unless it gets permission from Congress. In other words, according to the IRS, closing the loophole would require lawmakers to pass a new law specifically excluding illegal immigrants from claiming additional child tax credits.
The big questions now: Is Congress willing to do that?
Full statement to WTHR from the Internal Revenue Service
The law has been clear for over a decade that eligibility for these credits does not depend on work authorization status or the type of taxpayer identification number used. Any suggestion that the IRS shouldn’t be paying out these credits under current law to ITIN holders is simply incorrect. The IRS administers the law impartially and applies it as it is written. If the law were changed, the IRS would change its programs accordingly. The IRS disagrees with TIGTA’s recommendation on requiring additional documentation to verify child credit claims. As TIGTA acknowledges in this report, the IRS does not currently have the legal authority to verify and disallow the Child Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit during return processing simply because of the lack of documentation. The IRS has procedures in place specifically for the evaluation of questionable credit claims early in the processing stream and prior to issuance of a refund. The IRS continues to work to refine and improve our processes.
Chapter 4
Illegal Immigration and Crime
“We must fix our broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.”
—Nikki Haley
What you see
Over 60 percent of illegal immigrants have lived in the US for over a decade. Labor force participation is high, and crime rates are lower than that of US citizens.
Illegal immigrants largely work in positions that an aging and more educated workforce is unable to fill.
In relation to illegal immigration and crime, the major consensus is that immigrants in the US uniformly commit crimes on a lower level than native Americans. This school of thought and studies have been corroborated since the early 1900s. Articles on this point are too many to count when googled.
What you see
The data show that all immigrants—legal and illegal—are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans relative to their shares of the population. By themselves, illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.
An estimated 1,926,390 native-born Americans, 106,431 illegal immigrants, and 52,424 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2017. The incarceration rate for native-born Americans was 1,471 per 100,000; 756 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants; and 364 per 100,000 for legal immigrants in 2017. Illegal immigrants are 49 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Legal immigrants are 75 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives.
Legal and illegal immigrants were less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans in 2017, just as they were in 2014 and 2016. Those incarcerated do not represent the total number of immigrants who can be deported under current law or the complete number of convicted immigrant criminals who are in the United States but merely those who are incarcerated. The younger the immigrants are upon their arrival in the United States and the longer that they are here, the more likely they are to be incarcerated as adults
(Source: Criminal Immigrants in 2017: Their Numbers, Demographics, and Countries of Origin, Cato Institute, March 4, 2019).
Another study, published in March in the journal Criminology, looked at population-level crime rates: do places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants have higher rates of crime? The answer is a resounding no.
States with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through 2014. “Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence,” authors Michael T. Light and Ty Miller found.
That’s just a simple correlation, of course, and it’s well-documented that many factors beyond immigration can affect the crime rate. So Light and Miller ran a number of statistical analyses to more clearly isolate the effects of illegal immigration from those other factors. Among other things, they find that the relationship between high levels of illegal immigration and low levels of crime persists even after controlling for various economic and demographic factors such as age, urbanization, labor market conditions, and incarceration rates.
Our study calls into question one of the primary justifications for the immigration enforcement buildup Light and Miller concluded: “Any set of immigration policies moving forward should be crafted with the empirical understanding that undocumented immigration does not seem to have increased violent crime
(Source: “Two Charts Demolish the Notion That Immigrants Here Illegally Commit More Crime,” Washington Post, June 19, 2018).
The complete picture
Most states and our federal government have kept information and statistics about illegal immigration, crimes committed by illegals, and the costs borne by you, the US payer, out of public view. It is in fact difficult but not impossible to locate accurate crime statistics involving illegal immigrants. The statistics are buried both to suit a political agenda
