Radio Talkers Giving Illegal Aliens a Pass on Identity Theft

By Ronald W. Mortensen on May 28, 2014

Conservative talk radio hosts frequently talk about the scourge of identity theft as they do paid commercials designed to get their listeners to sign up for identity theft protection. However they don't tell their listeners that illegal immigration and identity theft go hand-in-hand, since illegal aliens routinely use the Social Security numbers of Americans in order to get jobs, credit, etc.

These conservative talk show hosts further fail to warn their listeners that children are prime targets of illegal alien identity theft, nor do they talk about the devastating consequences that many American children suffer when their Social Security numbers are used by illegal aliens – destroyed credit, corrupted medical records, denial of means-tested benefits, tax liabilities for income earned on their Social Security numbers by strangers, denied student loans, inability to get jobs or housing, etc.

Is this because they are simply unaware of the fact that illegal immigration and identity theft go hand-in-hand, as shown in a CIS Backgrounder I wrote five years ago, ("Illegal, but Not Undocumented: Identity Theft, Document Fraud, and Illegal Employment")? Or, more troubling, is it because their identity theft protection sponsor would drop them if they associated illegal immigration with identity theft?

If the former is the case, then conservative talk show hosts need to do their homework. If the latter is the case, then they are being less than honest with their audiences and they are sacrificing the futures of American children in order to retain their sponsors.

The bottom line is that the failure of these talk show luminaries to highlight illegal immigration-driven identity theft allows illegal aliens to commit Social Security fraud, forgery, perjury on I-9 forms, and massive child identity theft – all felonies – without being held accountable. And they allow amnesty proponents to get away with portraying criminal aliens as victims of mean-spirited conservatives rather than as people who prey on vulnerable American children in order to build better lives for themselves.

To stop identity theft and the push for amnesty, talk show hosts should mention illegal alien-driven child identity theft every time they pitch an identity theft protection program.

But they shouldn't stop there. They should tell the stories of the American children who are victims of illegal alien identity theft and demand that before any illegal alien gets legal status of any kind these American children have their good names and futures restored to them.

After all, these American kids are among the real victims of our dysfunctional immigration system, not the illegal aliens building lives for themselves by wrecking the lives of an untold number of innocent American children.