By Richard Hernandez
Governor Gavin Newsom is contemplating signing into law a bill passed by the California Legislature that would provide undocumented immigrants unemployment benefits.
Many are questioning the wisdom of including illegal immigrants in California’s unemployment program. Unemployment coverage is provided by a mixture of tax money, payments into the unemployment insurance fund made by employees while they are working and by employers. That undocumented aliens who have not contributed to the fund would be eligible to draw from it, endangering the funds solvency for those for whom it is intended, enrages some California residents.
Illegal agreements already have access to health care and other social benefits.
In 2020, the state allowed qualifying low-income undocumented immigrants to qualify for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a state tax credit worth hundreds of dollars, despite the consideration that many illegal aliens do not make income filings. In 2021, the state, which was already providing health care to undocumented mothers and their undocumented children up to the age of 25, made public health care available to undocumented migrants over the age of 50 living in California.
In legislation passed last year, which went into effect on January 1, the State of California expanded health insurance to about 700,000 illegal aliens between the ages 26 and 49.
This year, Senate Bill 227, authored by State Senator Maria Elena Durazo and co-authored by Wendy Carrillo and Miguel Santiago, was passed by both the State Senate and California Assembly. As worded the bill requires that by March 31, 2025, the California Department of Employment Development finalize a detailed plan to establish a so-called “permanent excluded workers program” to provide cash assistance that resembles unemployment insurance benefits to unemployed workers who are ineligible for unemployment insurance due to their immigration status. Those unemployed would receive $300 per week while they remain on the dole and are not employed.
Governor Newsom has until September 30 to consider the proposal. At that time, he must either sign it into law, not sign but allow it to go into effect minus his endorsement or veto it.
Newsom is termed out, as under California law, a governor can serve only two terms, and he was elected in 2018 and reelected in 2022. He thus is now considering his legacy. For much of his time as governor, as well as his eight years as lieutenant governor and time as the mayor of San Francisco, Newsom has lived a charmed political existence, though he had to endure some rough patches, as when Republicans sought, but failed, to recall him from office in 2021. All along, he has sought to present himself as a progressive with some moderate tendencies, and he embraced the Democrats values of inclusivity, which in many instances entailed wholeheartedly accepting policies that the opposing minority Republicans in the state denigrated as giveaways and freebies to illegal aliens, given that it was Newsom to hold the Democratic coalition of Hispanics, African Americans and liberal Anglos together. He encountered relatively easy sledding in doing so when the state’s coffers were overflowing with money, which was the case through most of his first four years in office, despite the challenges to the California economy during the 2020/early 2021 COVID crisis.
Newsom appeared to be going strong in sync with a humming state economy, and 14 months after surviving the September 2021 recall vote, he was reelected handily in November 2022. Heading into 2023, he and his advisors were confidently looking toward a high-functioning and achievement-rich second term, buoyed by the expectation that the state would achieve a $75.7 billion budget surplus in the 2023-24 fiscal year. That expectation remained operation to as late as February 2022, after which Newsom ran headlong into fiscal reality. The state’s economic core had been ravaged by the COVID-19 adjustments and permutations on one hand, with many businesses have suffered irretrievable losses or having closed without coming back, while many formerly productive workers, who were being provided with government COVID-related stipends, had grown accustomed to no longer working or working minimally and never reentered the workforce as it had previously existed. Simultaneously, virtually all of the state’s businesses, which following the 2007-to-2013 economic downturn were returning to profitability and thriving, found themselves being weighed down by the state’s heavy taxing regimes, which featured 14 different classes or forms of taxation. A large number of those in the 2020-to-2023 timeframe had resolved to leave the state or close. By early March 2022, Newsom’s financial prognosticators were telling him that the state would not be able to achieve the $75.7 billion budget surplus that had been forecast, and that he might realistically expect to have excessive cash in the neighborhood of half of that. By the end of March, Newsom was being told, the state could still count on being in the black, but not as grandly as was previously projected and more in the range of $20 billion. By the end of April, Newsom was informed, virtually all of the surplus that he had been counting on just a few months before was to be erased. Things grew worse from there, with the state having no choice but to dig into its reserves to balance the budget in 2023-24. While 2023-24 was no picnic, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office rained a thunderstorm onto Newsom’s parade while a virtual army of ants spread across his picnic tablecloth, when it projected the bleakest 2024-25 imaginable, nearly a 180-degree economic shift over what the governor and others thought was the case less than two years previously: a $73 billion deficit. Over the last four months, the combined California Legislature and the governor implemented a host of austerity measures, including a temporary tax hike on certain businesses, in an effort to reduce the deficit, having so far reduced the hemorrhaging of $73 billion in red ink to a still-devastating $46.8 billion shortfall.
As the 2024-25 fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30, progressed, Newsom found it necessary to abandon the cozy relationship he had striven to construct with California’s for more than six years. On August 29, he was presented with Assembly Bill 1840, authored by Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula (D-Fresno), was passed by the California Legislature and sent to Gavin’s desk for his signature.
Assembly Bill 1840 allowed undocumented immigrants to apply alongside other qualified applicants for the California Dream for All Shared Appreciation Loan Program, which offers up to $150,000 in no-interest loans to cover down payments and fees. The program lets applicants secure what are termed “loans” of 20 percent of a home’s purchase price up to $150,000 – an amount equal to a typical down payment on a home, in the form of a disbursement from the $255 million fund set aside for the program held within the California state treasury, prior to any payments having been made toward the purchase price on the home. The loan is to be recovered through the homeowner’s eventual repayment of the original loan amount plus 20 percent of the appreciated gain in the value of the home when it is sold, transferred or refinanced, though if the individual or couple who take out the loan does not sell it or refinance it and it remains with the purchaser’s or purchasers’ heirs or his, her or their trust into perpetuity, the “loan” might forever remain unpaid, as there is no provision in the law limiting how long the purchaser can hang on to the property.
While the minority Republicans in the Assembly and California Senate maintained that it was absurd for the state to provide individuals who were neither citizens nor legal residents of California and the United States loans funded by California taxpayers, the expectation was that Newsom would go along with Assembly Bill 1840 as he had with every previous giveaway to illegal aliens brought forth by the California Legislature. Indeed, Newsom indicated, were the money available to do so, he would have signed Assembly Bill 1840. Nevertheless, he said, the state simply could not afford to engage in such an act of generosity under California’s dire financial circumstances. On September 6, he vetoed Assembly bill 1840.
The reaction to what he had done was swift. Many Hispanics, who had assisted him in his political ambition, voted for him twice and stood side-by-side with him when the Republican had come for his head in 2021, expressed outrage at what they saw as the perfidious betrayal of La Raza. California’s Latinos had stood with him, through thick and thin, they said, but as soon as money got a little bit tight, he displayed his true colors as a typical patronizing Anglo politician who used his promises of compassion and understanding of his brown brothers and sisters to get the status and power that he wanted and then let them down in the clutch because the going was too tough for him. He is a racist hack politician, many opined, one who was even worse than the Republicans because of the way he masqueraded as something he was not. At least with the Republicans, what you saw was what you got. With Newsom, what you have, many opined, was someone loyal to himself and himself only.
With Senate Bill 227 having passed the legislature, the question of whether undocumented foreigners will be eligible to receive unemployment benefits now comes down to Governor Gavin Newsom.
He is under tremendous pressure from those in his own party and, in particular, what some refer to as his party’s ultraliberal wing to move forward with giving illegal aliens unemployment benefits by signing Senate Bill 227 into law.
An argument the Democrats are making to refute the Republicans’ characterization of allowing illegal aliens to collect unemployment benefits as both absurd and irresponsible is that the Democrats of late have taken action to curb illegal emigration.
The potential inclusion of those who are not in the United States or California legally in the program that provides stipends to those out of work is being debated as officials with the Joseph Biden Administration are debating with the Governor of Texas over who should properly take credit for a dip over the last month-and-a-half in the number of migrants crossing the U.S. border with Mexico.
In June, after more than three years during which officials with the Biden Administration minimized border control efforts, President Joseph Biden issued a proclamation in which he acknowledged what he termed “our broken immigration system” and mandated that the entry of any noncitizens into the United States across the southern border be suspended and limited, effective at on June 5, 2024. Exceptions to the ban on noncitizen crossovers were carved into the proclamation, allowing noncitizen nationals of the United States, lawful permanent residents of the United States, unaccompanied children, noncitizens determined to be victims of human trafficking, those holding valid visas, members of the United States Armed Forces and associated personnel, United States Government employees or contractors on orders abroad and their accompanying family members, noncitizens traveling pursuant to the visa waiver program, noncitizens seeking entry whom the Secretary of Homeland Security determines should for exceptional reasons be allowed entry, those who for what are determined to be significant law enforcement, public safety, urgent humanitarian, and public health reasons should be granted entry to the county, and those who have applied for entry and been properly processed.
President Biden’s proclamation called for the restrictions to be kept in place until 14 calendar days after the Secretary of Homeland Security makes a factual determination that there has been a 7-consecutive-calendar-day average of less than 1,500 encounters at all border crossings of noncitizens seeking to make entry into the United States.
It was President Biden’s action in June that has secured the border and has slowed the overwhelming flow of illegal aliens into the United States and, in particular, California, Democrats insist.
Texas Governor Rick Abbot, a Republican, takes issue with that assertion.
In the first place, according to Abbot, the Biden Administration is seeking to take credit for a slight downturn in illegal border crossings by attributing that trend to the proclamation.
“They’re claiming the numbers are down because of Biden’s executive order in June,” Abbot said. “The reality is that because of action Texas took, they began going down last year. Because Texas represents two-thirds of the border, we reduced illegal immigration by about 85 percent in the State of Texas. Of course, the border numbers are going to be down. Another reason the border crossings are down is because Biden is flying them across the border and then moving them to cities across the entire United States.”
Abbot called on his fellow governor to see through the Democratic Party’s false claim that the Biden Administration is pursuing a cogent and effective border policy and for him to reject any further state policies such as the provision of benefits to illegal aliens that is serving as an inducement for people south of the border to defy U.S. law by sneaking into the country and then applying for benefits to be paid for by U.S. citizens.
On one hand, Governor Newsom has made public statements that indicate he be believes the assertions of his fellow Democrats to the effect that the drop in the number of illegal aliens coming into California that has taken place since July is something the Biden Administration can take credit for.
On the other hand, Newsom has made clear that he has serious concerns about the state government’s fiscal health. He has shown his willingness to veto a bill that was widely deemed favorable to undocumented aliens when that bill carried with it the potential for draining available hard-to-come-by money from state social welfare programs.
Right now, his fellow and sister Democrats are doing their level best to convince the governor that their party’s policies in restricting illegal immigration makes the way clear to allow those undocumented aliens who have been unable to find work to apply for and receive unemployment checks. Newsom already accepts, as do other Democrats inside and outside California government, that the reduced influx of migrants into the state is an outgrowth of President Biden’s June proclamation. Those lobbying Newsom are pushing him to progress a step further to the progressive side, and stand with the other Democrats in Sacramento who feel the California Department of Employment Development should be entrusted with calibrating this particular social program for the public good, one which will provide those who have come over the border without applying for clearance from the federal government to do so with unemployment benefits.
Senate Bill 227 supporters say undocumented workers account for a major portion of state’s economy and they perform some of the hardest and most important jobs in the state.
State Senator Durazo maintains that many illegal aliens in California are working in jobs where they are paying, as employees, into the state unemployment insurance fund. They therefore should be able to draw from it if they become unemployed, she says.
Opponents of Senate Bill 227 point out that many undocumented workers are being paid under the table, what is being paid to them is not on the books, there is no money coming from them that is being used to infuse the state unemployment insurance fund, that allowing illegal aliens to draw unemployment insurance benefits they never paid for or contributed to will drain all of the money from the fund and giving illegal aliens such benefits will only encourage others who are south of the border to bring themselves north of the border. Moreover, Senate Bill 227 opponents assert, those who are here by breaking U.S. and California law should not be beneficiaries of California law.