You have to have legit SSNs for those 6 kids.
What banks impose restrictions on the ownership (individual vs. corporate) of the account at the receiving institution? While I haven’t sent many foreign wires, I’ve never been asked more than the name on the account.
There are already plenty of banks that market accounts to illegal immigrants, and if Envio Dinero suddenly cost a lot more, there’d be more immigrants opening such accounts. Plus, all it takes is for one member of a group to have an account–informal banking networks are pretty common among some immigrant communities.
So instead of lots of individuals sending lots of individual remittances, you have José’s Big Business sending a single large transfer to José’s Compadre’s account in Guadalajara, and then it being divied up and sent on from there. Sure, the government can clamp down on that, but the investigatory and prosecutorial resources required to clamp down on thousands of Josés (probably with very little cooperation from south of the border) might make the effort pointless.
For that matter, too many of the U.S. employers of undocumented workers know full well who and what they’re hiring, and are all too ready to help – see, for example, the many cases of employers who provided false papers. What happens when the wire transfer is not from José but from Joe’s Packing Plant, possibly supported by dummy invoices? Where is the government going to acquire the resources to investigate every single wire transfer headed to Mexico? (And if Joe is really looking to cover his tracks, it might go to the Caymans instead, to be sent on to Nauru and thence to Singapore before heading back to Tijuana. The U.S. government is likely fully capable to following this trail, but how many CAMS certified investigators are they willing to hire?)
Yes, this.
When I read the OP, I genuinely LOL’d, and there’s no way you could bully a country into doing this.
But thinking about it, it’s at least possible in theory with a carrot instead of a stick.
The US would have to massively reimburse Mexico in some way that could be spun to the Mexican people as a victory. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be money (indeed better if it isn’t) but the value of the reimbursement would have to be I think at least an order of magnitude more than the cost of building the wall, to make up for all the inconvenience and get the Mexican people on side.
It’s not strictly a requirement for the OP, but for this to actually happen, that same reimbursement would also need to be spinnable as a good deal for America. It can’t look like the Americans are basically just paying for the wall themselves, with a massive markup. It somehow has to look like the US isn’t paying anything it wouldn’t otherwise have paid.
In all seriousness, compared to Trump’s main plan of somehow massively cutting taxes and the deficit at the same time, figuring out a magic X that both countries can consider to be a financial gain should be a cinch.
Well, some do, but they also require a bank account to send it to. They also charge higher fees than WU. So if the tax is low enuf, no problems.
Umm, no, there aren’t. There was for a while, but new BSA regs have toughened the KYC requirements.
Hawala’s are illegal in the USA.
José’s Big Business would be spotted by the bank’s own internal analysts and shut down within a week. If they didnt the Regulators would shut the bank down.
Look, honestly, I am a subject matter expert on this- and your ideas wouldnt work. The web of AML regulation in the USA is deep and wide.
To work, illegally? You do not.
To claim them as dependents on your taxes.
They don’t?
That has not been my experience.
USBank: “We accept the Matricula Consular Mexicana as principal form of ID at all U.S. Bank branches!”
TDBank: A non-US passport and a non-US drivers license are adequate forms of identification to open an account.
Latino Credit Union: A government-issued ID from any country and an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number will get you membership.
Etc.
Yes, and what does that have to do with their existence? I’m pretty sure illegal immigrants are illegal too, and I’m pretty sure they’re in the U.S. anyway. “They’re illegal, therefore we don’t have to worry about them” is not a sound argument.
Like they shut Bernie Madoff down so promptly? I think you overestimate the capacity of federal regulators. There have been some very long-running money laundering schemes in this country and elsewhere, more than a few of which involved the tacit or explicit cooperation of bank personnel, and anyway this is a giant game of whack-a-mole. The account might well be open for only a few weeks or months, but as soon as it is shut down, there will be another account and/or another bank, maybe with Diego or Marco instead of José.
Regulation, however, is only as good as its enforcement, and if its enforcement requires too many resources, it won’t happen, or won’t be effective. The whole problem of undocumented workers exists because (despite a web of regulation) there are lots and lots of workers, lots and lots of employers, and not so many agents, auditors, and other enforcers.
For example, the IRS Criminal Investigation Division has had some notable successes ferreting out employers that are making more money than their legally documented workforce can account for, but the IRS isn’t exactly the most popular agency in Washington, and taxpayers (particularly political-contribution-making taxpayers) angrily decry the IRS “burden” and “overzealousness” and “overregulation” ; the agency is chronically underfunded. Do you honestly think those same political-contribution-making taxpayers are going to meekly accept (and fund!) another raft of federal regulators prying into their business affairs to make sure their payments to Mexico are all above-board? You are talking about vastly expanding the numbers of such regulators to deal with all of the new businesses moving into this space, and I don’t see it happening in the current political climate.
No one was talking about claiming them on tax returns (where SSNs would be required). To get out of having federal income tax deducted from your paycheck, you fill out a W-4, which only asks for the number of children you intend to claim as dependents.
Ok, then you file a return and have to pay. i dont see the benefit.
You say you have 6 dependents, and write ‘Exempt’ on line 7 of form W-4, and no taxes are withheld, and you don’t have to file to get anything back.
yesbut- you DO have to file, otherwise you go to jail. And the IRS is rather strict on those filing Exempt, there’s a penalty just for doing that wrongly.
Not to mention, Illegals do want to file and just about every amnesty program floated includes a long history of filing your taxes.
The IRS estimates that about 15% of taxpayers are not fully complying with the tax laws; in a typical year, the IRS will open around around a million and a half investigations for delinquent tax returns. Perhaps 4000 of those cases will be referred for criminal investigation, and maybe 2000 people will be convicted. (See IRS publication 55B for annual statistics.)
The vast and overwhelming majority of people who fail to file, and who the IRS catches not filing, will be assessed tax and civil penalty and go on their merry way. Going to jail for mere failure to file is incredibly rare, and going to jail for failure to file a return on which the tax due was only a few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars just doesn’t happen.
This goes back to the resources argument I made earlier: the IRS and the U.S. Attorney’s Offices don’t have the money and manpower to send low-level tax cheats to jail. Yes, tax evasion is illegal; yes, the law says you can be sent to federal prison. Without money and manpower, though, you won’t be.
It’s true that you will likely not go to jail. But you’ll owe a shit load, they will seize everything, take you bank accounts and in this case deport you.
Illegals are careful to stay out of the eyes of the law for this reason. They file and pay their taxes.
This is correct. IRS and most tax agencies know how unpopular they are, so they don’t sweat small stuff. They just want the money that the machines tell them you owe.
Off on a tangent, and I don’t know whether this was true then and/or is demonstrably true now, but I seem to remember reading a few years back that democratic administrations understandably frighten the bejesus out of conservatives with their tax proposals, and they are more likely to try to close loopholes for the rich, and change various definitions of income and taxable income in its many variants. However, they tend to be typically less aggressive (ever so slightly so) when it comes to enforcement and audits. Republican administrations, by contrast, are less likely to raise taxes, but tend to favor more aggressive collections and use the threat of prosecution more. Or maybe I just read some horseshit article - I don’t know. But it seemed actually believable.
Ok, that was fine, but we’d better get back on topic now.
Unless things have changed, you are in no way required to file a return with the IRS, unless you owe money.
I just wish a subject matter expert would weigh in.
Well, they haven’t changed and you’d be wrong. In general (forgetting the gazillion special cases involving foreign accounts, residency, on and on and on) the base requirement is gross income.
Hold on, hold on
The proposal is not for a tax on remittances by illegal immigrants. it’s a proposal for a tax on remittances, full stop. So if you’re proposing to draft regulations targetted at remittances by illegal immigrants, you have already abandoned the objective of drafting to implement the proposal.
Take a step back here. We know from the link in post #6 that the total value of remittances to Mexico is about $2bn per month. That’s remittances from all countries in the world, please note. We don’t have a figure for how much of that is remittances from the US.
I’m inclined to think that, probably, a large chunk of the $2bn is from the US. But we don’t know how much.
Secondly, note that the concept of “remittances” includes not only personal transfers (from households outside Mexico to households in Mexico) but also compensation of Mexican residents earned from employers outside Mexico. So if Mexican works abroad and then returns home with his accumulated savings, those are remittances. If a Mexican takes a job in Mexico, but working for an employer outside Mexico, his earnings from that job are remittances. (A Mexican employed by a foreign company in representativbe, marketing, sales agent, etc role, for example). And if a foreign employer posts a worker to Mexico, his earnings are remittances. The $2bn per month figure includes the salaries of all expatriates posted to Mexico.
So, to get a handle on this, out of the $2bn of remittances we have to identify how much is personal transfers, and how much is employee compensation of one kind or another. Then, of the personal transfers, we have to identify how much is coming from the US. Then, at any rate if we’re going to follow Dr Deth’s suggested methodology, we have to identify how much of that is made through wire transfers paid for in cash.
Once we have that figure, we can think about what percentage of levy Donald would need to impose in order to finance the construction of the Wall.
Lets say that, of the $2bn monthly remittances, 50% is personal transfers from the US. I think that’s generous, but it will do. And let’s assume that 50% of that is made through wire transfers paid for with cash.
That’s $500m per month, or $6bn a year. A 10% levy would raise $600 a year, provided we assume that the imposition of the levy did not reduce the amount of personal transfers made through wire transfers purchased with cash, which frankly seems to me to be a wildly unrealistic assumption. Even if its true, as Dr Deth asserts, that the people making wire transfers by cash are largely unbanked, I rather doubt if they would remain unbanked if they could save $50m a month by availing of banking services.
So let’s say, again, that 50% of the wire-purchased-by-cash remittances either switch to another mode of payment or cease to be paid at all in response to the imposition of the levy. That reduces the take from the levy to $300 million a year. That isn’t really a sufficient revenue stream to finance a $25 billion construction project, is it?
Of course, I’m picking figures out of the air here. My successive 50% assumptions are meaningless. But they highlight the point that this isn’t as easy as some would like to pretend. We need to define precisely the class of payments to Mexico which we intend to levy, and in doing so we need to bear in mind (a) US international obligations which prevent levies that would be a hidden tax on trade, and (b) the need to define a class of payments which can be levied practically. Then, and only then, can we have any idea of whether it is at all realistic to think of imposing a levy at a rate which would finance construction of the Wall