ICYMI: Padilla Underscores Immigrants’ Critical Role in Funding Social Security

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, joined a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the future of Social Security to highlight immigrants' essential role in contributing to the United States' workforce, the economy, and the long-term financial health of Social Security. Padilla questioned witnesses on the harmful impacts of President Trump's indiscriminate mass deportation agenda on Social Security solvency.

Padilla cited a 2024 Migration Policy Institute report that found that without immigrants and their U.S.-born children, the prime working age population would have shrunk by more than 8 million people between 2000 and 2023. On average, immigrants arriving in the United States are younger than the native-born population and have a higher labor force participation rate, paying into a system they may never become eligible to benefit from themselves.

He underscored that estimates from Social Security Administration actuaries and the Congressional Budget Office's 2024 surge report show that more immigration always leads to a decrease in the trust fund deficit. Karen Glenn, Chief Actuary at the Social Security Administration, and Molly Dahl, Chief of the Long-Term Analysis Unit of the Labor, Income Security, and Long-Term Analysis Division at the Congressional Budget Office, echoed Padilla's sentiments, noting that many immigrants who pay into Social Security and have U.S. citizen children will never receive those benefits. Ms. Glenn emphasized that the Trump Administration's detentions and deportations of legally working immigrants would hurt Social Security's solvency.

Padilla also made a statement criticizing the Administration's previously undisclosed data sharing agreement that gave the Department of Homeland Security access to sensitive personal data from the Social Security Administration on nearly every resident, including full social security numbers, addresses, and birth dates, for the purposes of election administration. He warned that the agency's outdated citizenship information will inevitably result in errors, potentially disenfranchising U.S. citizens and making the data of millions of residents vulnerable to an indiscriminate deportation campaign.

Key Excerpts:

• PADILLA: Question for Ms. Glenn: Social Security actuaries in their estimate of the impact of immigration over 25, 50, and even 75 years have found that more immigration always correlates with a decrease in the trust fund deficit and vice versa. Would you care to comment any further on that?

• GLENN: That's absolutely correct. All the factors you mentioned, immigrants who are paying into the system, many of them will never receive benefits, and they also have U.S.-born children.

• PADILLA: Ms. Dahl, the CBO's 2024 surge report made similar findings. Would you care to add any comment?

• DAHL: Absolutely. So in that, in that report that you're referring to, we looked at the effect of the surge on what we were calling the immigration surge, that increase in immigration that you that you referenced earlier, on the federal budget, and in particular in terms of social security … Immigrants come in, they're more likely to be of working age. Many work, pay payroll taxes. That is a benefit to the program, and then for a variety of reasons, many will not ultimately claim, and certainly won't be eligible to claim. They won't have their 40 quarters of coverage, for instance, inside the 10-year window.

• PADILLA: So is there an impact to the solvency of the Social Security program being felt by this Administration's mass deportation agenda? I mean, imagine if forget - I won't even say all immigrants are detained and or deported, but let's say half because we have cases and reports of it's not just undocumented immigrants that are being deported and or detained. There's legal immigrants with work permits that are being deported or, at a minimum, detained, with these arbitrary goals, not just for daily detentions and arrests, but the building out of significant detention center capacity across the country. Does that help or hurt our Social Security solvency?

• GLENN: It would hurt. We do some sensitivity analysis in the trustees report every year speaking to the effect of more and less immigration.

Video of Padilla's full questioning is available here.

Last year, Padilla joined 15 of his Democratic Senate colleagues in condemning and demanding the reversal of the Social Security Administration's decision to list certain immigrants as "dead" in the master files. Padilla previously emphasized the dangers and immense economic costs of the Trump Administration's mass deportation plans during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2024.

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