How Much Money Does California Spend On Illegals Programs A Year
In summary
California's undocumented immigrants risked themselves working during pandemic. Lawmakers want to pay them unemployment benefits.
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Paula Cortez Medrano has worked in the agriculture industry since she arrived in the U.S. over 25 years ago.
She has labored in the rut of Fresno summers, picking onions, tomatoes, grapes, and garlic and in the freezing temperatures of local produce packing houses, where she would wearable two layers of pants to stay warm while assembling frozen fruits and vegetables to be sold in grocery stores across the country.
She contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic and was sent home from work with only two weeks of paid ill leave. It took her 40 days to recover, but when she returned to her packing house chore, she was turned away.
"They told me that they had no more piece of work for me, that it was really slow," she said in Spanish in an interview with The Bee.
The 66 yr-former said she thinks she was turned away considering of her age; they never called her dorsum to work. Today, she sells tamales every bit a street vendor in key Fresno, earning an average of $80 a day, much less than the $15 per hour she earned in the packing business firm.
Because of workers similar Cortez Medrano, California Democratic lawmakers want to extend unemployment benefits to undocumented workers, a proposal backed by a new study by the UC Merced Customs and Labor Center which makes the example for why the California economic system, workforce, and families would benefit.
Introduced concluding month by Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, and currently under review in the legislature, AB 2847 would create the Excluded Workers Airplane pilot Programme, a 2-year programme that would provide funds to undocumented workers who lose their job or accept their hours reduced during the agenda year 2023. The proposal, estimated at $597 million, plus administrative costs, would allow qualifying, unemployed individuals to receive up to $300 a week for twenty weeks.
The report, released Thursday, argues that undocumented workers play a cardinal function in California's economy, contributing an estimated $three.vii billion in almanac state and local tax revenues. Additionally, these workers hold one in 16 jobs in the state, many of whom were deemed "essential workers" during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the risks they took working in the agriculture fields, meatpacking houses, and other key industries.
An estimated 2 million undocumented individuals live in California with near 1.one meg of that population participating in the workforce.
Of the ane.6 million workers in the central San Joaquin Valley, an estimated vii% are undocumented, the report states.
Nearly 38% of noncitizen workers, and more than 61% of children living with noncitizen workers, alive in households earning less than a living wage and face chronic and severe housing and nutrient insecurity, the study states. "Unfortunately, such workers face high rates of extreme hardship and do not take access to unemployment benefits."
The report concludes that the challenges facing undocumented workers are only likely to increase every bit a result of a number of environmental challenges like wildfires, earthquakes, extreme heat, and drought, piled on superlative of the ongoing public wellness crunch the state is already grappling with.
Cortez Medrano said admission to unemployment benefits from a pilot program would be "la gloria," or glory, and that she would utilize such funds to pay rent, bills, and buy food during her fourth dimension without stable work.
"I need the aid – urgently," she said in Spanish. "It'due south high time."
Beyond admission to unemployment, Cortez Medrano said what she really wants is a work permit to brand her job search easier. "I tin still work," she said.
High take chances, few safeguards for undocumented workforce
UC Merced researchers found a relationship between in-person work, unemployment benefits usage, and the undocumented workforce.
Workers in the industries with the highest COVID-related deaths too reported the lowest rates of unemployment insurance use.
Immigrants made upwardly nearly 60% of coronavirus-related deaths in California'due south industries with the highest charge per unit of pandemic-related deaths. Immigrants were the bulk of deaths in agriculture at 83%, landscaping, 81%, nutrient processing, 69%, restaurants and food services, 53%, and edifice services deaths, 52%.
Undocumented workers in these industries were specially vulnerable considering they had no source of wage replacement in the event of job loss. They are excluded from collecting benefits, fifty-fifty though they contribute to the unemployment insurance system.
"Lacking a safety cyberspace do good system, many undocumented workers often felt as if they had no choice but to go along working — facing unlawful working conditions that acquired serious risks to their ain and others' health — in order to meet their financial commitments," researchers said the report.
Admission to unemployment benefits could have prevented some of these deaths. "When workers don't have access to unemployment benefits, they're more vulnerable," said Edward Flores, professor of Sociology and researcher at the UC Merced Community and Labor Middle.
On the flip side, researchers constitute that workers in industries that accept depression rates of in-person work and higher rates of unemployment use didn't see such high increases in pandemic-related death.
Researchers concluded that "economic aid is an important tool that safeguards the health and wellbeing of workers and their families during a public health crunch."
California offered some support during the pandemic. Undocumented workers were eligible to receive up to $1,700 in state funds: a $500 COVID-19 Disaster Relief pre-paid bill of fare and $1,200 from the Gilt State Stimulus Fund.
Still, the report calculated these benefits were 20 times less than the $36,000 in economic aid that California citizen workers received from a mix of unemployment insurance, federal pandemic unemployment bounty, and federal stimulus aid during the first year of the pandemic.
Meanwhile employers in these industries reported record profits during the pandemic. In 2021, Fresno County saw record-breaking product, while meat processing company profits soared during the pandemic.
"Low earnings and a lack of a safety net, however, pose an ongoing threat to the economical stability and wellbeing of workers who created such wealth," said the report.
"Nosotros experienced a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, just then have an abundance of wealth to retrieve well-nigh how to manage."
Edward Flores, professor of Sociology and researcher at UC Merced
Part of the solution, according to the UC Merced researchers, is for the state to address this "policy gap" past taking advantage of the budget surplus and lessons learned from the pandemic.
"It took the Great Depression to create the New Deal and a lot of the worker protections that be today, like unemployment (insurance) or Social Security," said Flores of UC Merced.
"Our state is at a like historical juncture where nosotros experienced a in one case-in-a-lifetime crisis, simply so accept an abundance of wealth to think almost how to manage," he said.
California saw a $38 billion state budget surplus in 2021 and a $31 billion surplus in 2022.
"This is an opportunity now for policymakers to shut on the policy gaps non just for at present, but also for any subsequent public emergencies that happen in the time to come," Flores said.
California has extended state benefits to undocumented immigrants. In 2020, the state allowed qualifying low-income undocumented immigrants to qualify for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a state revenue enhancement credit worth hundreds of dollars. Last year the state made the historic movement of offering public health care to undocumented Californians 50 years and older.
But non everyone agrees with the thought of extending benefits to the undocumented.
"Defective a condom net do good system, many undocumented workers often felt as if they had no choice simply to proceed working in gild to run across their financial commitments."
report past the UC Merced Community and Labor Centre
During the initial months of the pandemic, when California appear the $125 million emergency relief fund that provided help to undocumented workers, The Center for American Liberty and Dhillon Law Group filed a lawsuit to attempt to block the aid bundle Newsom had already approved.
Eulalio Gomez, a spokesperson for the Fresno County Republican Party, said the proposed program is a reflection of how Sacramento is "disconnected" from middle-class California residents.
Gomez said undocumented people exercise "piece of work hard," simply he thinks providing them with unemployment benefits could attract more unauthorized clearing and hurt California's citizen workforce.
"I recall there could be negative impacts on unions and union members if you proceed incentivizing people to come hither," he said.
Merely the UC Merced researchers say there isn't any testify this would happen.
"It hasn't happened when we expanded health coverage; it hasn't happened when we removed exclusions to the CalEITC (Earned Income Tax Credit)," said Ana Padilla, executive director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. "There is no reason to believe it would happen in this case."
In addition, Padilla said, many recent migrants have been moving away from California in recent decades due to the loftier cost of living, which is causing the state'due south workforce to shrink.
'At that place'south no water, in that location are no jobs,' say some Valley farmworkers
An estimated 852,065 immigrants in California lost their jobs when the pandemic first hit in the spring of 2020, including 357,867 undocumented workers, according to a split June 2020 policy report from the UC Merced Community and Labor Middle.
The state'southward frontline workers are facing additional threats posed by climate change phenomena, which will impact the number of jobs available to such workers, resulting in displacement and income loss, said the study.
Already an estimated 8,745 full and part-time jobs were lost last yr due to the drought in the Central Valley, the Russian River Basin, and Northern Intermountain Valleys regions.
The undocumented workforce has been in turn down over the past decade, according to Flores of UC Merced, and the number of people retiring is growing — developments that are causing "seismic" demographic changes in the state'southward workforce.
"Nosotros need to have a workforce that'southward supported past the state that tin continue to (beget to) live in the state," he said. "Otherwise, the state'southward workforce is going to continue to shrink and the economy is going to have trouble growing."
Carlos Morales left his home in Coquimatlán, Colima, a pocket-size littoral state in Mexico, to work in California's Central Valley over fifteen years ago.
The xl-twelvemonth-old has worked in Fresno County's agriculture fields, harvesting crops similar peaches, nectarines, plums, and more. Now he worries about future job prospects for himself and his beau undocumented workers. "There are many fields where the farmers have stopped growing," Morales said in Spanish in an interview with The Bee.
Word is starting to spread among certain parts of the county workforce that "no hay agua, no hay trabajo," said Morales. "At that place'due south no water; there are no jobs."
If the proposed Excluded Workers Pilot Program is approved, California would join states such as New York and Colorado that accept recently launched like initiatives. New York's Excluded Worker'southward Fund has distributed $2 billion dollars to over 128,000 undocumented New Yorkers, while Colorado's Left Behind Workers Fund distributed millions of dollars to thousands of undocumented workers.
As for Morales, he said he wants country and federal leaders to know that undocumented workers have labored constantly during the pandemic, and should be helped in return.
"Supposedly we were essential workers," Morales said. "We're making this land strong."
"Volteen a vernos un poquito más," he said. "Plough around to run into the states a little fleck more."
Melissa Montalvo is a reporter with The Fresno Bee and a Report for America corps fellow member. This article is part of The California Divide , a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.
Source: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2022/04/california-undocumented-immigrants/
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