Among the barrage of controversial news items flooding the mainstream American media last month was the reported move of the US government to classify thousands of living immigrants in the country as dead (“muertos”) as far as the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) membership database was concerned.
This means that those people, most of whom are in the country legally albeit temporarily under the previous administration’s permissive immigration policies, will find it extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, to find gainful employment or seek benefits.
The move will also severely curtail the affected immigrants’ ability to transact business with banks or to avail of other elemental services, governmental or otherwise, that require a valid social security number.
This is because as “dead” people, their social security numbers are, to all intents and purposes, considered revoked, canceled, retired.
Meaning gone, kaput, done.
Or, to quote the legendary Panamanian pugilist Roberto Duran during his infamous ring deditionem in the 1980s, “no más” (no more).
Coincidentally, most of the people impacted by this real-life drama share a Hispanic heritage with Mr. No Más, which borders on the bizarre.
Although SSA officials have kept mum on the identities of the affected individuals, the majority, it is assumed, are beneficiaries of the prior administration’s special parole program that allowed people from certain Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, to enter and reside in the US temporarily while waiting for their family-based immigrant sponsorships to mature.
It is also believed that among the affected individuals are refugees or asylees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, two war-plagued countries whose nationals were temporarily paroled into the US by the previous administration. Turn to page 11
Unfortunately, declaring them as muertos/muertas for social security purposes has a knock-out impact, so to speak, on their everyday immigration struggles in the US.
Not only will they lose their ability to work legally in the country, they will also be forced to join the millions of undocumented immigrants already hiding in the shadows due to the ongoing termination of their parolee or refugee status by the current administration.
Indeed, as confirmed anonymously by some administration officials, the move is designed primarily to pressure the “living dead” immigrants to self-deport from the US.
Thus, like Roberto Duran’s iconic in-fight capitulation to another boxing great, Sugar Ray Leonard, during the second bout of their legendary boxing trilogy in the ‘80s, this slick move by the current administration may prove to be the ultimate knock-out punch or the last straw that would break the camel’s back as far as the impacted immigrants’ stubborn determination to fight for their quasi-legal immigration existence in the US is concerned.
Who knows, after this gambit, perhaps most of these immigrants, just like Roberto Duran who blamed stomach cramps for his humiliating defeat, will finally decide to throw in the towel and holler a “no más” cry of agony while clutching their famished tummies and collectively waving a white flag of surrender in front of the White House.
After all, how many more beatings can these weary immigrants take short of being deported to another country where they have no national or family ties and whose authoritarian leader’s idea of immigration detention is throwing them into a Gulag-like prison?