“They are undocumented aliens. … They’re paying taxes. It’s in everybody’s interest to have them pay the taxes they owe.” —former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, Senate Finance Committee meeting, Apr. 12, 2016

Nothing epitomizes the phrase, “boob bait for the masses” better than any assertion by government officials that this nation is genuinely committed to cracking down on illegal alien employees, or the employers who hire them. Koskinen’s above statement was his response to a question by Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN), who had discovered the IRS ignored evidence that illegal aliens were using fraudulent Social Security Numbers and that the IRS was continuing to process W-2s — and issue refunds to many of those illegals.

No doubt those who champion amnesty, often based on the notion that simply entering the country illegally shouldn’t be enough to warrant deportation, are equally sanguine when those same illegals commit forgery, Social Security fraud, identity theft, and perjury, even though those crimes are felonies.

Rampant numbers of felonies. According to the Social Security Administration, approximately 75% of illegal aliens have fraudulently obtained Social Security numbers (SSNs).

Moreover, the idea that these are victimless crimes is an abject lie. Since the vast majority of illegals purchase SSNs from fraudulent document dealers, chances are 50-50 a made up SNN actually belongs to an American or legal resident, including children. Even unborn Americans may end up victimized by being issued a number that has already been stolen.

As a result, legitimate SNN owners can have their credit history ruined, applications for Medicaid denied, medical records corrupted, jobs or student loans denied due to failed background checks, and liens for unpaid taxes issued, all arising from fraudulent or criminal behavior attached to SSNs used by illegals.

And government not only abides this wholesale criminality, it keeps Americans in the dark about it: an IRS Inspector General’s report released in 2016 revealed the agency knew that more than one million Americans had their SSNs stolen — but never bothered to tell the taxpayers themselves.

And SSN abuse is not the only scam perpetrated by illegals with the apparent blessing of the government. Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) are nine-digit tax-processing numbers assigned by the IRS to individuals obligated to file a federal tax return, but who lack, or are ineligible, for an SSN typically required to file taxes. As of last June, at least 2.4 million illegals had an ITIN, which they used in conjunction with a fraudulent SSN to file taxes. As The Washington Times revealed, a whopping 87% of forms filed online and more than half of forms filed by paper contained fraudulent numbers.

Americans might be forgiven for wondering why the use of an ITIN in conjunction with an SSN wouldn’t make it relatively easy for government to track down illegals and deport them. The answer is as simple as it is infuriating: Current law prohibits the IRS from communicating with the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, the agency who knows where the illegals are can’t tell the agency tasked with deporting them.

And just as infuriating, Congress refuses to change the law.

Another equally pernicious fraud perpetrated by the feds is the promotion of E-Verify as a panacea for all that ails a nation rife with illegal alien employees. “If you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable,” warned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan following ICE raids at several 7-Eleven stores around the nation earlier this month.

Not exactly. As columnist Tatiana Sanchez explains, “Questions have begun to resurface about the effectiveness of E-Verify, a 21-year-old electronic program designed to filter out undocumented immigrants who apply for jobs. Many Americans wonder how millions of them slip through the system.”

Sanchez tell us how, explaining the system is little more than “a political fig leaf, with so many significant flaws and loopholes that it allows employers to continue to knowingly hire undocumented workers with few repercussions.”

Why? According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which administers E-Verify, the system is used by more than 700,000 employers at more than 1.9 million hiring sites across the nation. Yet there are more than 18 million businesses currently in operation in the U.S. — meaning E-Verify is used by less than 4% of the nation’s employers.

The reasons for such a low participation rate? Despite the promises about crackdowns first made in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, E-Verify remains a voluntary program in most states, and only businesses with a history of hiring illegals are required to use it.

Moreover, Barack Obama’s pro-amnesty administration had its proverbial thumb on the scale. In eight years, the highest number of annual ICE business audits was 3,127 firms, with most years’ audits coming in well below that total. Thus, the odds of getting audited were virtually non-existent.

Congress could make the system mandatory nationwide, but that idea is broadly opposed by legislators.

Why? Because members of Congress “know it will work,” asserts Rosemary Jenks, Director of Government Relations at NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates reducing illegal and legal immigration. She explains, Democrats “know it will discourage illegal immigration, which will discourage the push for the next amnesty,” and “establishment Republicans don’t want it because they know it will be effective and eliminate their cheap labor pools.”

Unsurprisingly, money is at the root of both parties’ machinations. “All of the money is behind mass immigration, and then, there’s the American people on the other side. That’s the problem we have had,” Jenks explains. “That’s why we haven’t controlled immigration in the last five decades.”

Haven’t controlled it? Blatantly encouraged is more like it. And no one made it clearer than an apparently semi-comatose U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose failure to react to California AG Xavier Becerra’s threat to prosecute employers who comply with federal immigration law, is the epitome of surrender. California’s recently passed “Immigrant Worker Protection Act,” could engender fines as high as $10,000 on employers who volunteer to assist federal immigration authorities with an illegal employee crackdown.

Sessions should have insisted that any attempt to prosecute anyone under that secessionist-tinged statute would elicit obstruction of justice charges — against Becerra himself.

That he didn’t? Yet another indication among many that the globalist agenda of pretend crackdowns on American businesses — along with pretend border security — remains the order of the day, and that a reprise of the 1986 debacle, replete with the same phony promises, will ultimately prevail.

Once again, it will be sold as a “reasonable compromise,” with any resistance labeled as bigotry and nativism. And once again, in the not-too-distant future, it will likely precipitate the same exponential increase in illegal immigration the failure to enforce the 1986 law did. And once again, another subset of young illegals brought here “through no fault of their own” will demand amnesty.

Moreover, Americans should understand this orchestrated sellout of our sovereignty, language, customs and culture will occur as often as the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” requires.

The globalist agenda demands nothing less.