But the Stimulus Excludes Undocumented Families

We can’t pretend to be shocked that tax-paying immigrants are left out of the coronavirus relief plan. It’s always been this way.

My parents comprise part of the United States’ most vulnerable population: They are undocumented. My mother is a house cleaner, working inside the homes of upper-middle-class white people. Though she has seen her income decline due to coronavirus, she hasn’t lost all her business. Tomorrow morning, she’ll wake before dawn and haul her cleaning supplies to a few homes for a grueling day’s work.

My dad, too, is still working. He is a contractor with a company that works with food. Just as the grocery store workers are essential, so too are the people who supply their products. But with the company’s finances tanking, he worries about the future of his job. Like the bulk of undocumented immigrants—working in areas like food prep, agriculture, and cleaning services—they have found themselves at the front lines of the pandemic. They are both the most exposed and the most vulnerable. And they can’t count on the government’s stimulus package for help.

Congress’s $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill, and the stimulus checks included in it, has sparked a slight wave of relief for many people left reeling in the wake of the pandemic. But most undocumented immigrants are excluded from the individual aid, even if they pay their taxes. For my parents, and their four mixed-status children, that means no $1,200 checks, no way to apply for unemployment, no Medicaid benefits to tap should they contract the virus. The law is just another unsurprising blow to their already desperate state. Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate by immigration status — so why should the government’s relief efforts?

We can’t pretend to be shocked by our country’s treatment of undocumented immigrants; this is the way it’s always been. But now, without any official resources designed to help undocumented people, my family and millions of other unauthorized immigrants have been left to grapple with the fallout of Covid-19 alone, in a rapidly dissipating job market and without access to medical care. And they’re running out of time.

Like 45% of undocumented immigrants, my parents are uninsured. Their status has always barred them from accessing programs like Medicaid, and new government initiatives like the recent stimulus package continue to exclude them. My mother sometimes complains to me that she hasn’t seen a doctor in over 10 years. And while they aren’t necessarily unhealthy or immunocompromised, years of hard labor and stress have put a strain on their aging bodies. In the end, working is a Catch-22: My parents could choose to work less during this time and practice social distancing to avoid the risk of being crushed by medical bills if they were to get sick, but they wouldn’t survive without money coming in. They need it for themselves and their two youngest children, and they are willing to stake their health for it.

The crisis is simply amplifying the discrimination that has already been brewing in our systems for decades.

My two youngest siblings are both U.S. citizens, but Donald Trump’s public charge rule poses another problem. The law quietly went into effect in late February, and at its core, it intends to create a wealth test for immigrants, making it harder for them to obtain green cards. But it’s much more complicated than that. The law preys on the precious hope every single undocumented immigrant has been harboring from the second they set foot on U.S. soil. The hope that someday, if they’re well behaved and pay their taxes, the government will paint them a pathway to citizenship, and they will walk that gilded path to fully fledged Americanism. Instead, under the public charge rule, any immigrant who has accessed public benefits will have a difficult time ever obtaining a green card. Undocumented immigrants never had to access these benefits in the first place, but their citizen children, often growing up in low-income households, depend on them.

This amounts to a government-sanctioned “Sophie’s choice.” Unauthorized immigrants must choose between the health of their children (keeping them enrolled in programs like Medicaid and WIC) and abandon hope of citizenship, or they can sacrifice, as they so often have, in the hopes of someday having a real future in the country they’ve made their home.

My mom recently told me about a friend who is starting her own green card process. Her friend is desperately poor, but because of the new law, her lawyer urged her to take all five of her children out of Medicaid. She is now terrified. My own mother has painstakingly pulled her two youngest from the free and reduced lunch program at school. And she is mulling over taking them out of the Medicaid program too. Predictably, the timing of this public charge rule, which will leave millions of children without health care, is bound to have some disastrous consequences.

Looming over all these concerns is the inescapable threat of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the midst of a global crisis, ICE continues to hover around the neighborhoods of suspected undocumented immigrants, descending on them like vultures and cramming them into crowded, unsanitary jails and prisons across the country. Doctors warn that these facilities are potential breeding grounds for the virus, and earlier this week, a detainee and several ICE employees tested positive. Undocumented immigrants are used to living their lives carefully, in the darkness of shadows. But panic over deportations has peaked in recent years. Shifting immigration policies by the current administration and anti-immigration rhetoric have carefully cultivated a climate ripe with fear and anxiety. Many immigrants are now less likely to seek health care, forgoing testing and treatment out of fear that they may be reported for their status.

Denying unauthorized immigrants aid in this desperate time is not only inhumane, it is counterintuitive.

All these factors, compounded by the Senate’s proposal to exclude undocumented immigrants from the stimulus package, have created a ticking time bomb with catastrophic potential.

The fact that there are people who pay their taxes, (like many immigrants, my parents file tax using individual tax identification numbers) and who might be excluded from the stimulus package is infuriating and unjust — but it isn’t new. The crisis is simply amplifying the discrimination that has already been brewing in our systems for decades. What is new about this particular instance, however, is the sheer ridiculousness of it. From a public health perspective, denying health care and financial relief to any chunk of the population during a pandemic seems absurd. Especially to one of the most vulnerable populations in the country, one that lacks access to social safety net programs and is at high risk for hunger and eviction during times of crisis.

If pandemics teach us anything, it’s that we can only be as healthy as the sickest among us. By excluding unauthorized immigrants from the stimulus package, this bill will sanction the increase of coronavirus cases in the populations least equipped to handle them. And those cases will spread. Denying unauthorized immigrants aid in this desperate time is not only inhumane and immoral, it is counterintuitive.

Congress had a chance to remedy these problems for unauthorized immigrants, and yet they moved forward with this intentional omission. For that, I truly believe the choice will come to haunt them.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *