I’m old enough to remember when amnesty shills were promising that illegal aliens would become a fabulous source of tax revenue as soon as they were legalized.

We were sternly commanded to ignore all those studies showing the legalized alien population would be a staggering drain on our immense welfare state. The authors of such studies were torn to shreds for their alleged short-sightedness and xenophobia.

The amnesty shills, who spent years telling us illegal aliens were a poor and oppressed minority eking out a sparse existence from predatory employers while living miserably “in the shadows,” have recently spun on a dime and said to forget all that jive and believe their new party line that these “Americans-in-waiting” are far more productive than existing American citizens, including the chumps who waited in line for years to immigrate properly. Jeb Bush, to name a prominent example, often speaks as if he considers illegals qualitatively superior to Americans in their sense of family responsibility and work ethic, gingerly leaving the subject of their respect for the law to discuss another day.

Back here in the real world, everyone with a lick of common sense knew the amnesty critics were correct. Over the past few decades, we’ve built up a welfare state so gigantic, and so aggressive about recruiting new dependents, that plenty of native-born citizens with fairly decent jobs are now collecting benefits. Even if a staggering percentage of the amnestied population immediately found entry-level work – a highly dubious proposition even in a booming economy, never mind the anemic “recovery” that occasionally crawls ahead with a quarter of halfway-decent growth before collapsing in an exhausted heap – they’d still be a net drain on taxpayers.

To understand just how unlikely that best-case scenario is, consider that we’ve only had a couple of months in the entire Obama era where the overall American workforce actually grew. Even in months where the headlines blare that the official unemployment rate has dropped, the workforce has almost always declined as well. Introducing millions of new job-seekers into such an economy by Presidential fiat is irresponsible lunacy.

The amnesty crowd’s biggest swindle has already been exposed as a ridiculous lie: the illegals aren’t going to be paying any “back taxes” to “earn” their citizenship. They’re going to be able to collect money from the IRS through tax credits, up to $35,000 apiece. Now the Social Security Administration has confirmed that amnestied aliens will be able to collect benefits from it as well, as early as 2017.

We’re not talking about people stealing Social Security numbers and using them to scam benefits – that’s already happening, on an incredible scale, and the SSA doesn’t take even the simple precautionary measure of questioning how nearly four thousand people could be collecting benefits while claiming to be older than 113. Its system doesn’t even seem to have problems with a few thousand active Social Security clients who claim to have been born before the Civil War.

We learned about that crisis thanks to an inquiry from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who also asked the SSA to run the numbers on how many of our New Americans would be collecting benefits legally after Obama illegally dismantles our citizenship laws. The chief actuary responded that he expects about 16,000 “New Americans” to begin collecting Old-Age, Survivor’s, and Disability Insurance benefits by 2017, with the total rising steadily over the next four decades until it hits 695,000.

As Ryan Lovelace at National Review observes, even this estimate is absurdly optimistic, because it assumes the flow of illegal aliens will decrease after 2016. In reality, we’ll be hit by wave after wave of new illegals looking for their piece of the amnesty pie.

The flow will only decrease if Obama’s successor is extremely vigorous about building nearly impregnable border security, and fast. We always get promises of such security, of course – we’ve been hearing them for decades, while a mighty host of aliens marched across the border and ostensibly checkmated our Ruling Class into making them citizens. The chances of it actually happening are not favorable.

Another rosy assumption on SSA’s part is that the government will begin focusing more heavily on “identifying and departing undocumented residents who represent threats to national security, border security, and public safety.” We’ve been hearing that promise for decades too, while illegal alien criminals happily ride the catch-and-release merry-go-round, popping up on American soil again and again, some even after committing serious crimes.

During Shutdown Theater, the Obama Administration thought nothing of releasing a huge number of alien criminals as part of its effort to terrorize the American people into thinking that even the most limited government shutdown is instantly unbearable. Columnist Ann Coulter recently noted that illegal aliens kill far more Americans in a month than ISIS has during its entire existence, but we’re not even allowed to discuss the former as a security threat, let alone treat them like one.

If the biggest swindle perpetrated by the amnesty chorus was the ludicrous notion that illegals would pony up a fortune in back taxes to claim their citizenship papers, the second biggest is the promise that once they’ve got a few million more Democrat voters and cheap laborers squared away, the Ruling Class will suddenly begin administering the rest of our citizenship apparatus with renewed vigor. The only thing keeping them from securing the border and cracking down on serious crime from illegals has been the unbearable distraction of doing nothing whatsoever about the 11 million or so illegals they allowed to build up since the last amnesty deal!

Sometimes the amnesty crowd is honest enough to put this nonsense to us in the language of extortion with “comprehensive immigration reform” proposals: give us amnesty and we’ll finally do something or other about the porous southern border, pinky swear… but no amnesty and we’ll just let people keep waltzing in. Notice they’re not even bothering with that pretense any more, since comprehensive immigration reform fell through, and Obama decided to tear another chunk out of the Constitution with amnesty-by-fiat. Now we just get silly assumptions about improved border security and immigration enforcement baked into reports nobody will remember in a year or two.

The SSA assumes the court decisions against Obama’s amnesty plan won’t hold up, which is probably a safe bet, since the dictatorship is simply ignoring them anyway – Obama sneeringly dismissed the obstacle as “just one federal judge” and vowed to be more aggressive than ever in a Miami speech a couple of weeks ago. He’s all-in on lawlessness, while his incessant, transparently phony praise for “the people who work hard and play by the rules” gives way to the hard reality of rule-abiding taxpayers, both native-born and legal immigrant, paying through the nose to provide jobs and benefits to amnestied illegals.

None of this should surprise anyone.

Giant welfare states and torpid, hyper-regulated economies are fundamentally incompatible with open borders. There are many other reasons open borders are a bad idea, including the need to allow time for cultural assimilation and security considerations, but the bottom line is that unrestrained immigration is something weary socialist nations cannot afford.

We don’t have anything vaguely resembling the high-growth, low-taxed, investment-happy entrepreneurial boom economy required for small businesses to blossom like flowers and give good jobs with growth potential to the amnestied population. We do have the kind of monster maternal government that should logically require the strictest standards of identifying citizens and validating their claims upon government benefits… but instead, we’re fed a constant line of bull about how it’s functionally impossible to verify that every hand thrust into the taxpayers’ pockets belongs there. Now let’s give millions of new beneficiaries legal access to systems that are already scammed on an epic scale, and find out how much it costs us!