Mortimer, I'm just stating facts. Just because you want to believe something is true to fit your worldview doesn't mean that it has any basis in reality.
The articles that you cited do not particularly invalidate Mortimer's claims, as the payment of social security taxes through the use of fraudulent social security cards highlights the amount of other taxes that are evaded.
From the first article itself " Out of the nearly 11.1 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S., Pew Research projected that there were about 8 million in the workforce in 2014. Nearly half, or 3.4 million, of those workers paid Social Security taxes, according to 2014 estimates from the Social Security administration." So in other words only about half of the immigrants who could pay Social Security taxes actually did - probably because social security fraud was necessary to obtain employment as opposed to any genuine altruism, as indicated in this excerpt from the last article:
"It works like this: Many immigrants who aren’t authorized to work in the United States buy fake Social Security cards and present them to their employers, who either don’t know they are fake or don’t look too closely. When the employer submits a W-2 form and a tax payment on those workers’ behalf to the Social Security Administration, the federal government holds onto those payroll taxes, even if the Social Security number isn’t linked to anyone on file. And then, a large chunk of that money ends up in the Social Security trust funds, from which retirement benefits are doled out to aging Americans."
This is to say nothing about the non-payroll income taxes, and state and local taxes that are often evaded as well in order to prevent having their illegal status exposed by the authorities. As for the taking in more in benefits than they pay in taxes, that depends on how one defines "benefit" as most illegal immigrants do not qualify for federal welfare programs. However state and local governments do bear the burden of educating the children of such immigrants and maintaining the infrastructure that they use daily which would indicate a high cost of illegal immigration in that respect.
