The Illegal Elephant in the Room

There was an ID Theft Summit in California yesterday. USA Today reports:

Nearly one in 10 victims last year were from California, which had five of the nation’s top 15 regions for identity fraud reports, according to Federal Trade Commission data released last month. Although greater Phoenix reported the most fraud per capita, Californians in Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento counties were also highly vulnerable, according to the FTC.

Identity thieves live and strike disproportionately in the Sunbelt; California, Texas and Florida account for a disproportionate number of perpetrators and victims.

So why is so much ID theft occurring in these states? It must be uh, uh, uhhhhhh, it must beeeeee…. “meth dealers, (who) often use credit scored from identity theft to get money for labs’ raw materials and to pay pushers.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Please. Desperate to come up with any reason other than the obvious, the article contradicts itself when it says that Fresno, CA, which is in Fresno County, is the worst area for meth labs. But Fresno is not one of the counties in the “highly vulnerable” list above!

CA, AZ, TX, and FL have the highest concentrations of illegal immigrants in the country. ID theft by illegals is out of control:

During 2002, the year with the most recent figures available, 9 million people paid taxes with mismatched names and Social Security Numbers. Some were women who had failed to notify the agency that their name changed after marriage. Some were the result of typographical errors.

But most — between 50 and 80 percent depending on whom you talk to — represent illegal immigrants using a stolen or manufactured Social Security number at the workplace….

…..In 2001, Social Security reports indicated 35 percent of the wages in the (unassigned Social Security wages) fund were earned by workers in California. In 2002, about 46 percent of the wages that ended up in the fund come from immigrant-heavy industries like agriculture, restaurants and other services, according to Social Security’s Office of Inspector General. Both facts suggest to analysts that much of the fund is the result of payments made by undocumented immigrant workers.

That a conference convened to address identity theft appears not to have even broached the illegal-alien topic makes me doubt the seriousness of its law-enforcement and political participants. ID theft will never be controlled until they do something about the illegal elephant in the room.

UPDATE: Welcome to PrestoPundit readers (would that be PrestoPunditeers?), and thanks to Presto for noticing. Presto also notes that the ChoicePoint ID theft in CA was carried out by Nigerian-born scam artists in the U.S.