Poll: Majority of Democrats Want Bailout for Illegal Immigrant Poverty

migrants protest
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Almost three-in-five Democrats want taxpayers to bail out the poverty-stricken communities of illegal immigrants whom they welcomed into the United States, according to an April poll by Ipsos.

The April poll asked “if the government should provide temporary financial help for undocumented immigrants who can’t work because of layoffs or illness: 40% in favor, 42% against, 18% ‘didn’t know.'” said a report by USA Today, which commissioned the April 9-10 poll of 1,005 adults.

“Sixty-eight percent of Republicans oppose the idea; 58% of Democrats support it,” USA Today reported.

“It is important for us to focus on getting American workers into American jobs and making sure that our own people are healthy and able to survive,” responded Rosemary Jenks, the policy director at Numbers USA.

“The fact that the left and the business community – the big business folks – decided they needed to encourage illegal immigration does not mean that American taxpayers now have to bail them out,” she added. “That’s a problem with illegal immigration — every time you reward it, you  get more of it, and that’s exactly what the progressives want, and so does big business.”

Nationwide, the flood of at least eight million illegal migrants has forced down blue-collar wages, nudged up rents in blue-collar neighborhoods, and crowded the K-12 classrooms needed by American children.

Some illegal immigrants are university-trained migrants who overstay their legal visas and work off-the-books in well-paid, white-collar jobs. But most illegal migrants were poor in their own countries when they rationally walked through President Barack Obama’s weak border defenses.

In the United States, most illegal migrants have few connections to American communities around them. They earn little money, and they have almost no savings or social support amid the disastrous coronavirus epidemic and economic crash.

The Washington Post sketched out extreme poverty and the spreading disease in the imported workforce in Langley Park, MD. Roughly 70 percent of the adults in the neighborhood north of wealthy Washington, DC, are not citizens, including “Marco,” a diabetic migrant who has a valid “Temporary Protected Status” document:

The 55-year-old Honduran immigrant is one of the few in his apartment building to still have a job.

Yet with each day on his construction site came the risk of bringing the novel coronavirus home with him: home to his daughter with disabilities and a feeding tube in her stomach; home to a 7-year-old son with asthma; home to a wife without legal status and a household where the adults lack health insurance in a neighborhood packed with other vulnerable families.

…

As densely populated as parts of New York City, Langley Park is a maze of aging apartment complexes where neighbors from rural Guatemala now found themselves sharing a laundry room or a ride to a construction site or even a bedroom partitioned with sheets. But in a pandemic, that proximity could be deadly. “This distancing that they are talking about doesn’t apply here,” said Jorge Sactic, a local business leader and bakery owner.

Many of the migrants lost their jobs and transport when the Maryland government imposed a shutdown. Other migrants have been fired by their prosperous, often progressive, employers:

“They don’t want us going to their houses because they say we can bring them the virus,” said a 30-year-old woman from El Salvador. She hadn’t worked in a month, yet her $1,100 rent was still due. She had heard landlords weren’t supposed to evict anyone during the crisis, but, as with so many things, she feared there were other rules for undocumented people. Asked if she had enough in her savings to get by, she scoffed. “I don’t have a bank account,” she said.

Diabetic Marco protects himself from the Chinese coronavirus with his own remedies:

Marco had developed a recipe he believed would keep him healthy, which he prescribed to anyone who would listen with the confidence of a pharmacist.

“What I do before work is make myself a cup of coffee, nice and strong and black,” he had told Santos two days earlier. “The caffeine is good against any virus. And then a bit of Vicks under your nose. Vicks is good against any allergy, virus, whatever. Any bad air that passes under your nose, the Vicks attacks it and doesn’t let it pass.”

USA Today reported April 7 on an unemployed, illegal migrant couple with five children in Palisades Park, NJ:

Duarte, 38, who was born in Guatemala, said she stopped cleaning houses the day she found out her five children, ranging from 4 to 14 years old, would have to stay at home from school

…

The first week, it was her choice to stay home, she said, but the following week, the homeowners she worked for canceled after shutdowns went into effect. Duarte said she would normally make $300 to $400 a week cleaning houses.

Duarte’s partner, Walfre Corado, works as a painter at construction sites. He stopped working around the same time, also afraid of bringing the virus home. One of the couple’s daughters had lung surgery three years ago and is susceptible to bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses, Duarte said.

…

The couple have not left their home, but as each day passes, they worry more about how they will pay the $1,200 rent for the house they share with her sister’s family. Her sister’s husband lost his job, Duarte said.

“Illegal immigrants are living in bad conditions in the United States,” said Jenks, adding:

But they made that choice. They are here illegally. There’s no reason at all that U.S. taxpayers should pay even more — we’re already paying for education, emergency healthcare, and other programs they access. To give them a bailout because they are unemployed from jobs they took illegally is ridiculous … It would be nice for people to follow the country’s immigration laws.

Business groups should be required to verify that their workers are legal, she said.

“The first thing that needs to be done is mandatory -E-Verify — there comes a point where if you can’t get a job here, you will go somewhere where you can get a job,” she said.

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