As an orphaned child in rural southern Mexico, Abraham Salazar said he began working when he was just 10 years old. He helped to plow fields and grow corn and beans in the municipality of Constancia del Rosario, in the state of Oaxaca.
After he settled in California’s wine country in 1990, Salazar kept toiling in agriculture. He tore roots and rocks out to prepare fields for planting. He pruned and harvested miles of vines, sometimes during grueling all-night shifts.
Now 62 years old, Salazar said his lower back hurts, sometimes intensely. His heavily calloused hands are becoming arthritic. But he can’t afford to stop working, he said.
“I may be 80 or 90, but I won’t get anything of what I paid into Social Security during all those years of work,” said Salazar, who is turning 63 next week, in Spanish. “Absolutely nothing.”
Salazar is part of a growing wave of hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers who are reaching or past retirement age in the U.S. but who are ineligible to receive Social Security benefits, even though many paid automatic payroll taxes into that system for years.
A new state bill in California proposes to offer undocumented older adults an economic safety net when they can no longer work. AB 1536 would expand a state-funded cash assistance program, which currently offers individuals about $1,100 per month (PDF), to cover undocumented residents aged 65 and older as well.
“It would give them a monthly stipend, so that they can age with dignity and justice,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, after rallying for the bill with its author, Assemblymember Juan Carrillo (D-Palmdale), in Sacramento last week.
“If we do not create a [safety net] system for this population, we are going to have a severe crisis of individuals who have labored and contributed to California, but who will then live in severe poverty in the very same state where they left their youth,” Salas said.
Immigrants who are hired without valid work authorization in industries like construction and food services often provide a Social Security number that is fake, expired or not their own. Most employers in California and other states, who are not required to check the validity of the nine-digit number (PDF), deduct Social Security, federal, state and other taxes from the workers’ paychecks, like with any other employee.
The result is that nationwide, unauthorized immigrant workers contributed a whopping $13 billion in automatic payroll taxes to the Social Security system in a single year, according to the most recent estimates by the Social Security Administration.
Most of that money was a “net positive” to the program’s cash flow, said the agency’s chief actuary, Stephen Goss. That means undocumented workers help fund the monthly retirement checks of U.S. citizens and legal residents, but likely won’t receive the payments when they themselves become seniors.
