Tax law is the new Border Patrol
In the coming months, parents will receive hundreds of dollars as the Internal Revenue Service begins paying out the Advance Child Tax Credit, providing financial support to families and combating child poverty. Yet one significant group will be left out: parents of undocumented and certain noncitizen children.
The tax code excludes these parents because of immigration status, even though many have spent years in the United States dutifully paying state and federal income taxes along with property and sales taxes.
Using tax law to patrol the border is not new. In the 19th century, several states enacted constitutionally unsound tax laws to target migrants. New York raised a tax on oceanic migrants for “hospital moneys.” Massachusetts supplemented its foreign passenger tax by requiring a bond of $1,000 for any newly arrived “lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged, or infirm person.”
The Supreme Court found the taxes unconstitutional, explaining that whether foreigners will “be compelled to pay a tax, before they will be permitted to put their feet ashore” is exclusively a federal question. Even after this decision, California imposed special taxes on Chinese migrants until the state supreme court intervened.
Migrant taxes have largely evolved from explicit fees at entry ports to punitive federal tax provisions that cast immigrants financially adrift.
Although federal tax law allows and requires people without Social Security numbers to file taxes using an Individual Tax Identification Number, those filers are excluded from many tax credits. Consider that the CARES Act conditioned COVIDera stimulus payments on not only the recipients’ Social Security numbers, but also their loved ones’. The law initially excluded even citizen spouses from receiving the payment, if they filed jointly with a noncitizen without a Social Security number. Meanwhile, citizen children of parents without Social Security numbers were likewise left aside.
These exclusions echoed immigrationstatus restrictions in the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit — two provisions upon which workingclass and poor families depend. They also evoke the IRS’s direct collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security in violent workplace raids. (An IRS investigation into a Tennessee meatpacker’s tax compliance ended with allegations of armed state and federal officers violating workers’ civil rights with machine guns, racial slurs and mass detentions.)
Americans appear skeptical of taxbased immigration enforcement, which also treads on uncertain legal ground. In a poll from last year, there was more support than opposition to extending pandemic payments to “those who pay U.S. taxes,” even as support for other punitive enforcement measures prevailed.
Recent lawsuits challenged the CARES Act’s exclusion of citizen relatives of undocumented workers. In R.V. v. Yellen, citizen plaintiffs alleged that the denial of emergency tax relief to otherwiseeligible children for their parents’ lack of a social security number violated equal protection. In another case, lead plaintiff Ivania Amador and her three children possessed Social Security Numbers while her husband did not. She argued that denials based on their spouses’ undocumented status violated their marriagebased due process and equal protection rights, as well as their First Amendment speech and associational rights. Tax law’s policing of borders may unconstitutionally cross the boundaries of familial integrity.
As the federal government financially casts undocumented immigrants aside, some individual states are starting to offer lifelines. New York recently created an Excluded Workers Fund to provide financial relief to noncitizens excluded from unemployment insurance and federal programs. States including California and Oregon, meanwhile, have extended their statelevel EITCs to undocumented immigrants, potentially including employment considered illegal under federal law. These financial and tax laws generate thorny questions about where state authority ends and federal power dominates.
Federalism limits states and cities’ abilities to directly regulate immigration. Yet despite these limitations, states still possess unique tax powers, particularly to promote residents’ health and safety across immigration statuses. Cities and states are choosing to foster inclusion to balance the weaponization of federal tax law against immigrants. While the Supreme Court may ultimately weigh in again on limits to state and local action, for now, states and localities should feel legally comfortable pursuing a range of immigrantinclusive financial and tax policies.
Federally, effective methods exist to deal with tax noncompliance beyond cooperation with immigration enforcement. In 2017, the Treasury Inspector General suggested a more “focused strategy” on employers and payroll service providers to reduce tax noncompliance. Unlike using tax law to deport migrants, focusing on employers could raise needed revenue and comply with the Supreme Court’s employerfocused interpretation of immigration enforcement statutes. In contrast, cooperation between tax and immigration authorities could inhibit undocumented immigrants’ tax compliance, for fear that information sharing could lead to deportation.
Policing poor immigrants through tax law weakens the borders between immigration and tax law meant to protect citizens and noncitizens alike. Respecting those borders is as important as respecting territorial ones.