Immigration and Subnational Fiscal Citizenship: The Expansion of State Earned Income Tax Credits to ITIN Filers

Daniel R. Alvord, Oklahoma State University
Ben Merriman, University of Kansas

The United States developed no uniform, national system of personal identification, and the coercive and beneficent powers of American government are widely dispersed. The contemporary politics of immigration has thus become a fragmented politics of documentation. Certain documents confer specific forms of recognition and access to varying degrees in different places and contexts of government interaction. The individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) has conferred an asymmetric recognition since its creation in the 1990s: ITINs allow millions of immigrants, mostly unauthorized to work in the US, to file federal income taxes, but not to claim Social Security or claim various federal tax credits. In recent years, ten states and Washington, DC have altered their income tax codes to allow ITIN filers to claim the state earned income tax credit, potentially putting money back in the hands of over a million poor working families. We study this wave of state tax and immigration reform using public documents, open records requests, and interviews. These policies have been adopted under virtually identical state political circumstances. However, the immediate effects of the changes have varied. In some states, most notably Maryland, a large proportion of ITIN filers immediately began claiming the state EITC. In other states, uptake has been much lower. The activity of immigrant-serving non-profit organizations is crucial: in states where immigrants are too few to sustain a strong network of social service organizations, or where enactment of tax reform was driven by policy wonks rather than grassroots advocacy, uptake of these materially significant credits has been much lower. Implementation has been most immediately successful where there is strong collaboration between revenue agencies, advocates, and social service non-profits. Thus, moving from symbolic inclusion to a materially beneficial model of subnational fiscal citizenship depends on specific organizational and institutional matters, as well as politics.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 14. Taxes, Business, and Society