1

On Totalization of Social Security Project,

Olga M. Lazin

FYI. The premise is that more immigration would be encouraged by

the agreement......that people would come here to make sure they are
insured for retirement. That would mean that the immigrants are
better informed than the general population about their pension rights.
Please ignore the fact that workers are here to eat today and feed their
families and also ignore the fact that the U.S. economy will slow down
without those workers.

A point is also articulated that Mexico is actively encouraging

emigration as part of the official government policy.

Motto:
Tonight, the battle over so-called Social Security reform has escalated. The
Senate Finance Committee considering President Bush's plan for Social Security
reform. My guest, the committee's chairman and ranking Democrat.
Securing our borders. Immigration reform groups go to Capitol Hill today, fighting
for strict border security and tighter immigration laws. Tonight, a Latino-American
woman who's helping lead that fight for border security and immigration reform.,
CNN, april 26, 2005.

Bureau of National Affairs, Inc.

Volume 03 Number 176

Friday, September 12, 2003
ISSN 1523-5718

Social Security
Barnhart Pushes for Totalization Agreement
Giving Illegal Workers New Benefit Rights
Social Security Administration Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart told a
House subcommittee Sept. 11 of the benefits of establishing a
totalization agreement with Mexico that other witnesses said would
allow a greater portion of the estimated five million illegal Mexican
immigrants in the United States to collect Social Security benefits and
provide an incentive for others to illegally enter the country.

Totalization agreements eliminate the double taxation of employees

who split their careers between two countries. Workers who cannot
receive Social Security benefits because they lack the 40 coverage
credits--representing 40 quarters of employment--from the United
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States can make up the difference in coverage credits from their home
countries.

According to the General Accounting Office, immigrants are not

allowed to work in the United States unless specifically authorized,
though many do and pay Social Security taxes that apply towards
earning Social Security benefits.

Barbara Bovbjerg, director of education, workforce, and income

security issues at GAO, said in her testimony (GAO-03-1035T) that
Mexican workers who currently would not qualify for benefits because
they fall short of the 40 coverage credits could, under a totalization
agreement, qualify with as few as six coverage credits. More family
members of covered Mexican workers would become newly entitled
because totalization agreements usually waive requirements that
prevent payments to noncitizens' dependent and survivors living
outside the United States.

The annual foreign tax savings of United States workers and their
employers is more than $800 million, while foreign workers and their
employers in the United States save only $200 million. SSA actuaries
estimate that a totalization agreement with Mexico would cost the
United States $78 million in its first year before averaging out at about
$110 million per year, based on the 50,000 newly eligible beneficiaries
in Mexico that SSA estimates would grow sixfold over time.

Bovbjerg said that estimate was highly uncertain given the absence of
data about the true number of illegal immigrants in the United States.
The SSA figure does not directly consider the estimated millions of
current and former unauthorized workers and family members from
Mexico and "appears small in comparison with those estimates.

"The estimate also inherently assumes that the behavior of Mexican

citizens would not change and does not recognize that an agreement
could create an additional incentive for unauthorized workers to enter
the United States to work and maintain documentation to claim their
earnings under a false identity," Bovbjerg said.

Nontransparent Assessment
Barnhart said SSA has had informal discussions with Mexico over the
last two years regarding a potential agreement. She dispatched a
deputy commissioner and other SSA official to Mexico to be briefed on
Mexican Social Security operations, and the group concluded that
Mexico was prepared to administer a totalization agreement.
 3

Bovbjerg said in her testimony that SSA took no technical staff on the
visit to assess system controls or data integrity processes, nor did it
document its efforts or perform any additional analyses to assess the
integrity of Mexico's data and controls over that data.

"A lack of transparency in SSA's processes, and the limited nature of its
review of Mexico's program, cause us to question the extent to which
SSA will be positioned to respond to potential program risks should a
totalization agreement with Mexico take place," Bovbjerg said.

Bobvbjerg's testimony is available at

<http://www.gao.gov/>http://www.gao.gov/.

By Kurt Ritterpusch

Copyright (c) 2003 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., Washington

D.C.

X-Spam-Score: **

Shades of Mexico?

September 15, 2003, NYT

Hue and Cry Replaces Yawns in Vote on Texas Constitution

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL.

HOUSTON, Sept. 12 ˜ Yup, it's constitutional amendment time again in

Texas. Time for another stab at improving, or at any rate expanding, an
already enormous document of 82,800 words, more than eight
times as long as the federal Constitution, that has been
amended no fewer than 410 times since 1876, according to the
Texas Legislative Reference Library. And 174 other efforts
failed.

In other states, legislators pass bills. In Texas, they put it into the
Constitution. It happens again on Saturday, when voters will decide on
almost two dozen amendments to the bulging document. (Only
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Alabama's Constitution is longer ˜ a whopping 315,000 words,

with 740 amendments.)

Often the plebiscites are heavy with local minutiae and ignored by 93
percent or so of the electorate. The soporifics this year include a
proposition allowing cities to donate surplus equipment to rural
volunteer fire departments and one authorizing property tax
exemptions for travel trailers not used for business.

But this referendum, surprisingly, is no yawner. Though it falls in late

summer and seemed destined for the usual obscurity, it has turned
into a lively scrape over citizen access to the courts and challenges to
Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, by some high-ranking Republican jurists
and conservative interests, as well as a broad range of civic activists.

One such combatant is Ed Parton, a contractor and president of Texas

Black Bass Unlimited, who is mobilizing his fellow fishermen to sink a
hotly contested proposition backed by the Texas medical establishment
and Governor Perry to supposedly cure a medical malpractice claims
crisis and "save your doctor."

Critics, including leading Texas newspapers, say the proposition will

overturn the Texas Bill of Rights.

"I think this is a horrible mistake," said Mr. Parton, 61, before launching
his 21-foot red Triton into Lake Houston the other day. He said that it
was less about medicine than water pollution, and that he had been
sending e-mail messages to his group's 10,000 members to vote no.

Some doctors, in turn, have been lobbying for the measure by handing
patients cards that say, "Your Next Appointment Is on Election Day."
Some men who visited the Reliant Center for free prostate screenings
on Thursday were asked afterward to vote yes.

The flashpoint is Proposition 12, which would bar the courts from
setting or reviewing noneconomic damages against doctors and
medical providers ˜ claims for disfigurement and pain and suffering, for
example. It does not set caps on such claims; the Legislature already
did that in its last session. And it does not limit actual monetary
damages for loss of income.

The proposition does not sound very exciting: "A constitutional

amendment concerning civil lawsuits against doctors and health care
providers, and other actions, authorizing the Legislature to determine
limitations on noneconomic damages."
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Backers like Governor Perry say it is needed to curb the influence of

trial lawyers, to lower malpractice premiums and halt a drain of doctors
out of Texas.

"We have evidence of good doctors leaving," said Ray Sullivan, a

former press aide to Mr. Perry and his predecessor George W. Bush,
and now a consultant to a group called Yes On 12. The rising cost of
malpractice insurance, he contended, helped explain why 152 of the
state's 254 counties have no obstetrician.

But Gary Keith, a lecturer in the government department of the

University of Texas and a co-author of a textbook on Texas government
and politics, said, "It is very cleverly or cynically designed to allow the
Legislature to do whatever it wants."

"Medical malpractice is the Trojan horse to allow the Legislature to do

things it never could before," Mr. Keith said. "This alters the openness
of the courts."

Mr. Keith said the reason Texas' Constitution ˜ its seventh since 1836 ˜
was so unwieldy was that it was not drafted as a basic charter. "The
drafters were so fearful of getting a government that they would not
like that they seeded it with statute-level provisions," he said.

"It gets more and more gummed up every year," he added.

Deborah Hankinson, a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court and a

Republican who is serving as treasurer of another opposition group
called Save Texas Courts, is another high-profile critic. "Proposition 12
seeks to amend the Texas Bill of Rights," Ms. Hankinson said. "For me,
this is a constitutional issue, not a question of health care in Texas."

And, Ms. Hankinson said, "there's greater protection in the Texas Bill of
Rights than the federal Constitution." Texans are specifically
guaranteed both the right to access the courts and to have a remedy.
"We trace that to Magna Carta," she said.

Contrary to the way proponents portray the issue, she said, this was
not a vote for caps on damage claims. The Legislature already voted to
limit noneconomic claims to $750,000 a case ˜ $250,000 against a
doctor and another $250,000 against each of up to two hospitals or
other health care providers. Many states have caps, she said. But only
Texas would have a constitutional ban on judicial review.

Furthermore, opponents say, the provision opens the door to efforts by

corporations accused in pollution or injury cases to close off
 6

defendants' access to the courts. The Legislature voted to require a

supermajority of three-fifths to extend the proposition's reach to such
other cases, but opponents say that is still an inadequate trade-off for
closing off judicial remedies.

With the debate sharpening in recent days, the opponents now include
Mothers Against Drunk Driving, AARP, the Dallas and Houston Police
Associations, the Texas Federation of Teachers, the Sierra Club, and
Cathie Adams, the president of Texas Eagle Forum, an affiliate of the
conservative pro-family group founded by Phyllis Schlafly in 1972.

"It's so misleading that people are being told this will save their
doctor," Ms. Adams said."