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Legislative Update: Our Action Crucial to Stop Social Security Agreement With Mexico!
By Patty Gaul, Director of Legislative Affairs, TREA Senior Citizens League The U.S. currently has Totalization agreements with some twenty other nations. However, the big question mark regarding a possible agreement with Mexico is that wages earned while in the U.S. illegally could be counted toward the eligibility threshold. In late June, the U.S. and the Mexican governments signed a treaty, which will go into effect unless Congress passes a resolution to disapprove the treaty. TSCL is concerned about the potential cost of such a treaty and the potential for it to increase illegal immigration from Mexico. In prepared testimony in September 2003, U.S. Government Accountability Office (at the time, the government body known as the Government Accounting Office) specialist Barbara Bovbjerg stated that, �the cost of a totalization agreement with Mexico is highly uncertain.� Because of our apprehensions about how the Totalization agreement with Mexico would affect our Social Security Trust fund, we support a resolution that would disapprove it. Congressman Mac Collins (Georgia) has introduced H. Res. 720 to prevent the treaty from going into effect. If you oppose such a treaty, we encourage you to sign the petition we have initiated that will let Members of Congress know about the agreement and that you as their constituents oppose such a plan. You may access the petition from our homepage at www.tscl.org. Congress has sixty days of sitting in session to disapprove the agreement; otherwise, it will go into effect. We urge you to act now. As of this writing, the resolution has 23 co-sponsors. You can see if your U.S. Representative has signed on as a co-sponsor at the following: http://www.tscl.org/Bills.asp or by calling our office at 1-800-333-8725. We will continue our aggressive lobbying efforts to see that this plan is not adopted. September 2004 | ||||||||
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