If your plan is to hurt Americans by lying about Social Security, and finding a scapegoat for Social Security “fraud”, the scapegoat in this case being undocumented immigrants(and after all, fascism loves and depends on scapegoats), well there’s Elon Musk….He is a lying POS.
I should think that even Trump supporters would still want their elderly family members taken care of, and would not want Social Security undermined by an immigrant who lies about such a crucial safety net. But, I guess not, he’s fooling millions….
Just look at these LIES!!
Elon Musk has pushed
false claims that millions of dead people are collecting Social Security benefits. Now he’s peddling another specious story about the program: that immigrants are being given Social Security cards too freely, then collecting benefits and voting.
At a town hall-style
event in Wisconsin on Sunday night, Musk and close ally Antonio Gracias — whom Musk
has tapped to help with the U.S. DOGE Service’s efforts to make cuts at the Social Security Administration — displayed a bar chart that Gracias said showed a large increase in noncitizens getting Social Security numbers.
“This is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said, as people in the audience lifted their phones to photograph the screen.
“This literally blew us away,” Gracias added.
Immigrants who are legally authorized to work in the United States do in fact receive Social Security numbers. That’s how the system is designed. The Social Security Act requires numbers be assigned promptly to immigrants who are legally in the country to work.
But Musk and Gracias presented the fact that some noncitizens have Social Security numbers as shocking, characterizing it as something they had stumbled upon and were exposing, with Gracias claiming federal employees who had shared the data had taken a “risk” to do so.
The numbers on Musk’s screen appeared to come from a government program that was set up to streamline the process through which immigrants get their Social Security numbers. A September 2023 government
audit found that the Social Security Administration correctly processed noncitizens’ cases 99.8 percent of the time in that program and a related one.
“There’s no fraud here,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the conservative Cato Institute. The increase in the number of noncitizens entering the Social Security system, he said, had been predicted based on the increase in asylum seekers in the past few years.
The presentation by the two men appeared to be the latest step in Musk’s effort to undermine Americans’ confidence in Social Security by making unsupported claims of problems with the system.
Musk and Gracias claimed that undocumented immigrants are getting payments from Social Security, when
in reality, they often help finance the system without being able to collect benefits of their own. Undocumented immigrants cannot collect Social Security, and those who pay into Social Security give billions annually — in 2022,
an estimated $25 billion.
Undocumented immigrants who do not have legal work authorization do not get Social Security numbers. They must apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number, which they use to pay taxes while working without lawful status.
Musk and Gracias also inaccurately alleged some immigrants were receiving “max pay” in benefits, which is not a concept that exists in Social Security.
And they made claims of
voter fraud by noncitizens that echo
debunked theories from President Donald Trump and his allies.
In reality, having a Social Security card does not indicate anything about whether someone is receiving benefits, nor does it mean someone is registered to vote. Noncitizens’ Social Security cards are clearly labeled as valid for work only and cannot be used to register to vote.
www.independent.co.uk
www.bbc.com
www.france24.com
www.politico.eu
www.newsweek.com
theonion.com
