It pays to get Schumerized! Did you know that previously illegal immigrants who are legalized–like the 11 million immigrants granted Registered Provisional status by the Schumer-Rubio Gang of 8 bill–not only qualify for the Earned Income Tax credit (EITC) when they go to work (which seems reasonable enough to me) but may also get to apply for retroactive credits for previous years in which they were working illegally? Law professor Jan Ting of Temple University has the story. … Meanwhile, the Gang of 8 seems to have abandoned the idea of actually collecting back taxes from the vast majority of newly legalized (despite all the talk about how legalization isn’t “amnesty” because there are penalties etc,). But, hey, that doesn’t mean the IRS can’t send them back refunds!
A visit to the IRS could actually be quite lucrative for many of newly Schumerized “provisionals.” The maximum annual EITC refund is a little over $5,000 per year for a person with two children who earns between about $13,000 and $17,000. You can can get $6,000 per year if you have three or more children. That means a potential refund check in the $15,000 range for three years of illegal, pre-amnesty work.
It’s almost as if the Clinton IRS, which opened up the refund loophole, decided to design a benefit so wacky that Gang of 8 legalizers could easily agree to give it up as a concession/fig leaf/bargaining chip to nervous Republicans and red state Dems during a Senate floor debate like the one we are about to have. …
But really it’s an indication of the generous pro-undocumented mindset of the bureaucracies that will be deciding which immigrants get what long after the Senate has put any legislation “behind” it. …