Are “Illegals” Using Social Security?

00The narrative being tested

“Illegals are collecting Social Security” is not one claim — it is at least three claims that circulate together and borrow credibility from each other. They have different answers, so this page pulls them apart:

• The benefits claim: undocumented immigrants are receiving Social Security retirement, disability, or survivor checks.
• The 2025 claims: millions of Social Security numbers were handed to “illegals” (the chart presented by Elon Musk and DOGE’s Antonio Gracias, March 2025); “150-year-olds” and millions of dead people are on the rolls collecting checks (February 2025); and Social Security is a “magnet” drawing illegal immigration.
• The drain claim: whatever the mechanism, undocumented immigrants are a net cost helping bankrupt the program.

01The law: why they cannot be paid

This is the foundation, and it is unusually clean — it rests on statutory text anyone can look up. Congress built the bar in two 1996 laws and closed the remaining earnings loophole in 2004.

“Individuals who enter the country as unauthorized immigrants and remain in that status for life are relatively unlikely to receive benefits.” — Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary, Actuarial Note No. 151 (2013)

What this means in one sentence: since 1996 an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. cannot lawfully be paid Social Security, and since 2004 an undocumented worker generally cannot even accrue eligibility on unauthorized work.

02The 2025 claims, one at a time

These are the versions of the narrative most readers saw most recently. Each one dissolves on contact with the primary documents — often documents produced by the government’s own auditors years earlier.

2.1  “There are 150-year-olds collecting Social Security”

Elon Musk (February 11, 2025) said DOGE found “people in there that are 150 years old” in Social Security data. President Trump (February 18, 2025) said “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving benefits, speculating “maybe millions” were being improperly paid.

The source of the big numbers is not a DOGE discovery. It is the SSA Inspector General’s July 2023 audit (A-06-21-51022), which found 18.9 million SSN holders born in 1920 or earlier with no death record in SSA’s Numident master file. The same audit found the opposite of the claim built on it:

• A missing death record is not a benefit check. The OIG’s own conclusion: “almost none of the 18.9 million numberholders currently receive SSA payments.”
• SSA already had a kill-switch. Since September 2015, SSA automatically treats numberholders aged 115+ as deceased and stops payments.
• Reality check on scale: in December 2024, just 89,106 people aged 99 or older were receiving Social Security retirement benefits — consistent with U.S. centenarian demographics, not with “millions.”
• SSA corrected the record itself. Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek (February 19, 2025): “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
• And note whose finding it was: the “dead people in the database” issue was documented by SSA’s own Inspector General in 2023 (and in a 2015 predecessor audit) — a known, audited records problem long before it was presented as a new fraud discovery.

2.2  “Millions of Social Security numbers were issued to illegals”

At a March 30, 2025 event in Wisconsin, Musk and DOGE’s Antonio Gracias presented a chart showing noncitizen SSN issuance rising from about 270,000 in FY2021 to over 2 million in FY2024 — roughly 5.5 million across FY2021–FY2025 — framed as SSNs for “illegals.”

The numbers appear to be real. The label is not. The chart counts SSNs issued through Enumeration Beyond Entry (EBE) — a joint SSA/DHS program created in October 2017, during the first Trump administration, that issues an SSN automatically when DHS approves an application for work authorization, permanent residency, or naturalization. By definition, every SSN in that pipeline went to someone the federal government had granted legal work authorization or status: green-card holders, work-visa holders, TPS holders, parolees with work permits, and asylum applicants (who can obtain a work permit only after a statutory waiting period).

The numbers rose because lawful work-authorization grants rose — driven by the 2021–2024 border surge and the parole and asylum pathways that carry work-permit eligibility. That is a fair immigration-policy debate to have. But PolitiFact’s conclusion on the chart itself: it showed “the Social Security system working as intended by law.”

2.3  “Social Security is a magnet for illegal immigration”

The mechanism this claim requires — that undocumented immigrants can collect Social Security — does not exist, per the statutes in Section 01. Whatever draws migration (jobs, safety, family), Social Security checks are not legally available to be that magnet. And the money data in the next section shows what the “magnet” population actually does to the program: it pays in, at roughly 348 dollars for every dollar that comes back out.

03Follow the money: who is subsidizing whom

The strongest material on this page, because the most authoritative number comes from the Social Security Administration itself — not from an advocacy group on either side.

3.1  SSA’s own actuaries: net positive $12 billion in one year

SSA’s Office of the Chief Actuary (Actuarial Note No. 151, 2013) estimated that in 2010 about 3.1 million unauthorized immigrants worked on the books and paid Social Security payroll taxes — out of roughly 7.0 million unauthorized workers total (the rest worked in the underground economy and paid nothing in). The on-the-books workers and their employers paid an estimated $13 billion in OASDI payroll taxes. Benefits paid that year based on unauthorized work: about $1 billion.

3.2  CBO’s projection for the recent surge: 348 to 1

The Congressional Budget Office (July 2024, publication 60569) analyzed the 2021–2026 immigration surge population — predominantly people without permanent legal status: illegal entrants, visa overstayers, parolees, and asylum applicants. CBO projects that over 2024–2034 this population will pay $443 billion in payroll taxes, of which $348 billion is Social Security taxes — against total Social Security benefit spending on the same population of about $1 billion (roughly 12,000 disability and 11,000 retirement beneficiaries by 2034).

3.3  The Earnings Suspense File: taxes paid toward nobody’s benefits

When wages are reported under a name/SSN combination that doesn’t match SSA’s records — partly clerical error, partly unauthorized workers using invalid, borrowed, or made-up SSNs — the money still gets taxed, but the earnings go into the Earnings Suspense File, credited to no one.

The ESF is genuinely the narrative’s strongest exhibit — documentary evidence of SSN misuse at scale (Section 04 takes it seriously). But notice its fiscal direction: it is money paid into the trust funds on earnings for which benefits may never be payable.

3.4  Current-dollar estimates

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in total federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including $25.7 billion in Social Security payroll taxes — toward programs they are legally excluded from while undocumented. Sourcing honesty: ITEP is a left-leaning think tank and these are model-based estimates; this page treats them as corroboration, not foundation. The direction and rough magnitude are independently supported — Yale Budget Lab estimated ~$66 billion in federal payroll and income taxes for 2023, the American Immigration Council ~$89.8 billion total for 2023, and SSA’s own $13B-per-year payroll-tax figure from 2010 scales consistently.

3.5  Why the asymmetry exists

It is not an accident — it is the design Congress built in 1996 and 2004. Payroll tax is owed on wages regardless of the worker’s status (employers withhold FICA whether the SSN is valid or not), but payment of benefits requires lawful presence, and crediting of post-2003 earnings requires work authorization. Taxes in: unconditional. Benefits out: heavily conditioned. The narrative has the pipe running in exactly the wrong direction.

04The kernel of truth — stated plainly

The narrative is wrong in its headline form, but it is not built on nothing. Five real things sit underneath it. A fact-check that hides them isn’t a fact-check.

• SSN misuse and identity fraud by unauthorized workers is real and large-scale. The Earnings Suspense File’s trillions in unmatched wages are partly the paper trail of people working under invalid, borrowed, or stolen SSNs — which is identity fraud, causes real harm to the citizens whose numbers are used, and is fairly criticized on its own terms (GAO-03-993; CRS; SSA OIG). What it is not is undocumented immigrants collecting benefits — it is the opposite: taxes paid on earnings that mostly never produce benefits.
• Pre-2004 unauthorized earnings can still count. For SSNs assigned before January 1, 2004, covered earnings from unauthorized work can confer insured status. Benefits still cannot be paid while the person is in the U.S. unlawfully — but a worker who later obtains lawful status (or, in narrow cases under the § 202(t) alien-nonpayment and totalization rules, one who claims from abroad) can be paid partly on unauthorized work. A genuine, bounded pathway — grandfathered, shrinking every year.
• Millions of noncitizens really did get SSNs in 2021–2025. The ~5.5 million EBE figure appears to be a real count. The false step was the label: those SSNs are issued only upon approved work authorization or status. The kernel is “the immigration surge produced millions of newly work-authorized noncitizens”; the spin is “SSNs for illegals.”
• Legalization would convert some suspended earnings into future claims. If large numbers of currently undocumented workers later legalize, some pre-2004 earnings could be reinstated and become benefit obligations. SSA’s actuaries modeled unauthorized immigration as net positive for the trust funds even so — but the long-run picture is an estimate, not an audit.
• Illegal collection through fraud exists — its scale is the honest open question. The statutory bar governs lawful payment; it cannot prevent collection via a stolen identity or an unreported death, and SSA’s Inspector General prosecutes such cases continually. No credible source quantifies a materially large flow of benefit dollars to not-lawfully-present people — and neither DOGE nor SSA has published such a figure. The defensible statement: documented cases exist; no evidence supports a materially large flow; and the burden of proof for “millions” sits with the claimants, who have not met it.

05The argument, assembled

• The law bars payment. Since 1996, no Social Security benefit is payable to anyone not lawfully present in the U.S.; since 2004, unauthorized work on a new SSN earns no eligibility at all.
• The 2025 claims collapse against their own sources. The “150-year-olds” came from a 2023 government audit that itself says ~98% of those records receive nothing. The “millions of SSNs” counted a legal work-authorization pipeline created under the first Trump administration.
• The money runs the other way. SSA: +$12 billion net in one year. CBO: ~348:1 in-to-out for the surge population. ESF: $1.5+ trillion in taxed wages credited to no one.
• The kernel is real but narrow — and it points the same direction. SSN misuse is genuine fraud whose fiscal effect is to subsidize the trust fund, not drain it.
• The honest open question is fraud-side scale — documented cases exist, no evidence supports “millions,” and the people claiming otherwise have published no number.

06Sources