So I keep hearing about how illegal aliens pay taxes, but I never heard an explanation of how exactly that's figured out, they're called "undocumented" so how does the government track an undocumented person, let alone know they're paying taxes?
After some searching there were a lot of bad faith arguments like "they pay sales tax!" as if it was somehow even a choice, but these are the only valid explanations I got:
>immigrants here on work visas get a social security number, that is valid for life, so even after their work visa expires they can continue paying tax
>when the 1040 form is submitted for income tax, the w7 form is stapled to it and a ITIN number is requested, the ITIN is an ID issued by the IRS for people who are not eligible to obtain a social security number
so in these ways immigrants who were legal under a visa are tracked, or border hoppers are tracked legitimately
however, more commonly I saw explained
>illegals use "randomly generated" or stolen social security numbers and their employer gets a letter from the IRS stating the social security number is invalid because it shows up twice in their records
in this case, the government never follows through with any action, taxes continue to be taken from illegals and the illegals will never be able to claim it because they're using a stolen identity, so the government can determine how much tax revenue is generated by these stolen identities but keeps it all, probably why democrats are so keen on having so many illegals, it's literally free money funneled into government
the IRS may also audit the actual owner of the stolen identity because of the discrepencies with their data
however, there is also this fun possibility which skews the data:
>immigrants with a worker visa get social security number, when visa expires they go back home and sell their social security number for big money, someone new comes in with a valid social security number and is able to pay taxes without raising any red flags
and none of this takes into account illegals who work and get paid under the table
so next time someone tells you how illegal aliens are also paying taxes, you can probe them on whether they're using a bad faith argument like "sales tax", or they support illegals never being able to claim their income tax to fuel a government they hate, or illegals with stolen identities, but rest assured if there was a million illegals getting paid under the table they cannot be accounted for