As a matter of unlovely habit, apologists for illegal immigrants are wont to dismissively declare that, by entering the United States without permission and remaining here without the requisite legal dispensation, they have committed only a “civil infraction.” Insofar as this is true, it represents such a limited rejoinder to the objection as to be meaningless. Rare is the illegal immigrant who breaks into America and then does nothing else besides. Illegal immigrants work without permission. They dodge the country’s archipelago of employment law. They use government services that are designed to exclude them. They dishonestly submit forms that compel faithfulness in their authors. To respond to these abuses by insisting that their illegitimate presence in the United States is not a big deal is as silly as to respond to the abuses of a tax cheat by declaring that he is an American citizen: Narrowly correct, but beside the material point.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Eli Saslow provided us with a harrowing illustration of this problem. Saslow’s story features an American named Dan Kluver, who was repeatedly harassed by both federal and state officials because an illegal immigrant from Guatemala had stolen his identity. That illegal immigrant’s name was Romeo Pérez-Bravo, but he had adopted so many others over the years that, by the time he was discovered, they had “started to blur together.” As Dan Kluver, Pérez-Bravo had incurred debts, earned wages, racked up traffic violations, and even killed a guy — all of which, naturally, were traced to his victim rather than himself. That, in every part of this country, is a serious crime whether one is a citizen, an illegal immigrant, or anything else in between. If I had done it, I, too, would have been charged.
But, of course, I have not done what Romeo Pérez-Bravo did, because I am not an illegal immigrant. Certainly, there are some exceptions to the rule, but, as a general matter, it is safe to assume that very few legal residents will choose either to engage in identity fraud or to bypass the social contract completely, whereas, because they effectively have to, almost every illegal immigrant is driven to take one of those paths. For various reasons — including the majority’s preference for a set of labor laws, public services, and welfare-and-retirement programs that are inconsistent with unfiltered immigration — Americans want their national government to possess and enforce an immigration policy. When it does not, they profoundly dislike the consequences. This, and not some pedantic commitment to policing “civil infractions,” is why it is important that our elected officials keep our borders supervised. For better or for worse, contemporary life in the United States revolves around Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, credit scores, and other tracking systems that, if they are to work, must be closely overseen. That a given person might not like that setup is neither here nor there; if, absent abolition or reform, it is allowed to atrophy, the results will be catastrophic.
How catastrophic? As the New York Times notes, “as many as one million undocumented workers are using fraudulent or stolen Social Security numbers” — numbers that “are skimmed from data breaches, sold in black markets online for as little as $150 or handed out in border towns by human smugglers.” This, per the paper’s report, is what happened to just one of them:
Some years the other Dan Kluver had earned more than his own salary at a local sugar beet factory, which pushed the total income under his Social Security number into a higher tax bracket as the debt started to mount. Twice, he’d contacted law enforcement and filed an identity theft report with the federal government, where it landed in a pile along with tens of thousands of similar reports filed each year. He waited for relief while the I.R.S. docked his annual tax returns and garnished a few of his paychecks, costing him thousands. Finally, a few months before their wedding in 2012, Kristy decided to pay off the balance, emptying her savings and sending in a check for $6,000. Their relief lasted until the next tax season, when a new bill arrived — this one for $22,000.
As one might expect, this took a toll on his personal life:
They spent the next decade living with the consequences — annual tax audits, budgets that never added up, whispered arguments after the kids went to bed. Kluver kept calling government numbers and waiting on hold until he eventually resigned himself to a payment plan. He agreed to send the I.R.S. $150 each month, which he’d done more than 35 times. “I can’t keep obsessing over this and getting nowhere,” he told Kristy. “I need to think about something else.”
If I may put it poetically, this is a full-frontal approach to Dan Kluver’s American Dream. In recent years, that phrase has been primarily used to describe the aspirations of immigrants such as myself, but, properly understood, it ought to apply no less rigorously to those who were born here. Eventually, Dan Kluver decided to “think about something else” — but that was not a victory, it was a resignation, an abdication, a surrender. Because of what Romeo Pérez-Bravo did, Dan Kluver was obliged to conclude that the promises of this country were no longer available to him. And who could blame him? It is stressful enough to have the IRS harassing you, but to have your tax returns rejected and your pay packets garnished and your savings demanded ad nauseam — on the basis of money you never earned or got to enjoy! — is intolerable. In such a situation, one cannot plan, or save, or make much sense of the world.
The Times’ headline is “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.” This is preposterous. If the attached story were about two taxpayers who, by dint of an innocent mistake at the Treasury, had been allocated the same Social Security number, that description might make sense. But it was not. It was about a man who broke the rules of entry, who broke the rules of the society in which he was trespassing, and who tried to get away with both crimes by riding on the back of an innocent man. That man, Romeo Pérez-Bravo, belongs in prison. His scapegoat, Dan Kluver, deserves an apology, restitution, and a vow from his representatives that they will do better in the future.
Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.
Reprinted with permission from National Review by Charles C. W. Cooke.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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