Did you know that paying income taxes is the law for anyone who earns wages in the United States, including undocumented immigrants?

Each year, United Way’s Earn It! Keep It! Save It! provides free tax filing assistance to thousands of undocumented workers in the Bay Area, helping them to participate in our country’s tax system.

Below is an excerpt from the MissionLoc@l article, “Undocumented Head to Accountants to Pay Taxes,” which describes the unique challenges this community faces during tax season.

For Carlos Rodriguez, a self-declared undocumented immigrant, tax day isn’t about refunds or money he’ll have to pay to the government. It’s about establishing a record.

“I don’t have any reason to hide,” he said on a recent evening, while waiting along with a handful of other immigrants, for his appointment at a free tax clinic on Mission Street.

Tax preparers throughout the Mission District, say that tax filers like Rodriguez are increasing, despite the recession. They are walking, W-2s in hand, into storefronts along Mission Street advertising tax prep services in Spanish or the handful of free clinics run out of non-profits and community centers on evenings and weekends.

Such tax services in the Mission rival taquerias for the highest number of storefronts and have become ubiquitous in most heavily Latino communities as millions of undocumented immigrants file tax returns each year, even without collecting the benefits for which they pay.

For ten years, Rodriguez, a roofer who is now unemployed, has diligently declared his income to the Internal Revenue Service so that he can prove his tenure in the country if there is immigration reform and that he—like a legal resident—has contributed to government coffers.

Paying income taxes is the law for anyone who earns wages in the United States. Yet undocumented immigrants face special challenges in filing a return.

To work legally in the country, an employee needs a valid social security number. But undocumented workers are ineligible for one.

That leads many undocumented workers to make up social security numbers or acquire somebody else’s number, said Francine Lipman, a professor of tax law at Chapman University in Los Angeles.

Since 1996, the IRS has issued Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, which has reduced the confusion this creates, she added. The nine-digit codes are issued to anyone ineligible for a social security number and serve as a unique identifier for the purpose of paying taxes.

ITINs can also be used for other things, like opening bank accounts or getting a car loan. But they do not give a person the right to work legally in the country.

Read the complete MissionLoc@l article, Undocumented Head to Accountants to Pay Taxes.”