How many migrants are receiving Social Security numbers?
(NewsNation) — Tech billionaire Elon Musk is claiming that Social Security numbers were handed out last year to more than 2 million immigrants who entered the United States illegally and that those cards were subsequently used to collect benefits the migrants are not entitled to receive.
Musk, speaking at a weekend town hall meeting in Wisconsin, displayed data from a Social Security program called Enumeration Beyond Entry, which indicated that nearly 2.1 million migrants were given Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2024 alone.
That figure was a sharp increase from the 590,000 noncitizens who received Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2022 and the 964,000 who received them in 2023, EBE data showed. The Trump administration estimates that 11 million immigrants who crossed the border illegally are currently living in the U.S.
Pew Research reported last year that about 8.3 million workers who held jobs in the nation in 2022 were migrants.
Musk and venture capitalist Antonio Gracias, who has been assisting the Department of Government Efficiency in examining the Social Security Administration, claim that the free-wheeling nature of Social Security numbers reportedly being given to migrants is an example of fraudulent activity within the SSA.
“This literally blew us away,” Gracias said at the town hall. “We went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident.”
How migrants get Social Security numbers
The Social Security Administration reports that, in general, only noncitizens who are authorized by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to work in the United States are eligible to receive Social Security numbers.
Once authorized to legally work in the U.S., migrants are eligible to apply for a Social Security card. However, the agency stipulates that for non-U.S. citizens to receive Supplemental Security Income, they must have been granted a certain classification by the Department of Homeland Security.
Those classifications include being legally admitted into the country as a permanent resident, granted conditional entry or asylum, paroled into the United States or admitted as a refugee.
However, Gracias alleged Sunday that migrants were given Social Security numbers automatically through the mail without being interviewed or being required to show identification after applying for and receiving a work permit.
The EBE program that distributes Social Security numbers to migrants with work authorizations began in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first White House term. The initiative was established as a partnership between the SSA and DHS to assist the SSA in efficiently issuing Social Security numbers to migrants who were deemed eligible.
The SSA’s inspector general wrote in 2019 that the program allowed Homeland Security to vet the legal status of migrants who were eligible to work and then automatically issue them with Social Security numbers. As part of the process, migrants seeking Social Security numbers were required to provide proof of their legal status.
A SSA spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email from Nexstar's NewsNation seeking comment about the claims or the EBE data Thursday.
Musk claims migrant Social Security benefits are 'massive' Biden program
Musk said Sunday the issuance of the Social Security numbers was part of a “massive large-scale program" by the Biden administration to “import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one-party system from which there would be no escape.”
Gracias added that migrants who received Social Security numbers were receiving “max benefits” and that the noncitizens who were issued the Social Security numbers were using them to register to vote. The claims came after Musk previously alleged that Social Security benefits had been paid to tens of millions of people who had died.
However, despite the growth in recent years of migrants who were provided with Social Security numbers, a 2023 government audit cited by The Washington Post stated that the SSA correctly processed cases for noncitizens to be issued Social Security numbers 99.8% of the time.
Experts, such as former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley, told Rolling Stone that the increase in Social Security numbers being issued to migrants was “inevitable” due to former President Joe Biden’s policies regarding lawfully admitted immigrants at the U.S. southern border.
How working migrants pay into Social Security
A 2024 analysis conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showed that migrants paid $96.7 billion into federal, state and local taxes in 2022. The migrant employees who have been issued work permits also paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes during the same year, although, in most cases, they are not eligible to receive benefits from federal agencies.
As Trump has vowed to stop the flow of migrants entering the country illegally, ITEP found that providing access to work authorizations to all migrants would increase their tax contributions from $40.2 billion per year to $136.9 billion. More than $33 billion of the difference would go to the federal government, the study found,