(Photo by Jerry Cornfield/Washington State Standard)
As an agricultural worker in Wapato, Washington, Sandra D. works with her husband to support her three children.
Like many immigrants, Sandra came to the United States looking for a better life for herself and her family. She grew up in poverty in Michoacan, Mexico and her family couldn’t afford to pay for her education past elementary school so Sandra started working in agriculture at age 10.
Her workdays sometimes start at 4 a.m. to avoid the Yakima Valley’s hot temperatures in the summer, Sandra said in an interview in Spanish. The Standard is not identifying her by her full name because of her legal status. She, like many farm workers in the region, is usually paid minimum wage — $16.66 an hour in Wapato — to do labor-intensive work for 40 hours a week.
But agricultural labor is dependent on harvests, which typically fall from March to November. In the winter, it’s hard for Sandra to find employment in the fields, making it difficult to get by.
During these times, she’s turned to food stamps or local food banks to keep her family fed. Non-citizens are not eligible for food stamps but they can claim them on behalf of their children if their kids are U.S. citizens. They’re also not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits.
Sandra said if unemployment insurance were an option, it would allow her to deal with unexpected emergencies, like when her youngest son broke his foot and they had to drive up to Seattle to get surgery.
“We have to rely on our savings and sometimes we don’t have any and we have to ask for help,” Sandra said.
A pair of bills in the state Senate and House this year looked at creating an unemployment insurance program for immigrants who are not authorized to work in the U.S. It would have allowed people to receive the benefit when they lose employment through no fault of their own.
But the bills did not pass out of committees ahead of a key deadline, meaning they’ve failed for the year.
A long-standing proposal
The proposed program is not a new idea. Advocates have raised it since the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Washington ran a temporary program that provided one-time payments of $1,000 to individuals who did not qualify for unemployment benefits due to their immigration status.
Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, and sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, has worked on refining it to address concerns.
One of the biggest issues this year was around implementation and creating regulations for a third-party administrator.
The plan was for a third-party administrator to run the program and for applicants to self-attest how many hours they’d worked, providing written documentation for the administrator to verify their claim.
By not looping in businesses, it would protect the privacy of immigrants and prevent employers from being held liable for knowingly hiring immigrants without legal immigration status.
According to Saldaña, there wasn’t enough time this session to add amendments to the bill to create auditing systems for the administrator to help prevent fraud.
The legislation made it further in the legislative process this time around than in past years.
“I do think that we’ve narrowed it and put some more sideboards on to address many of the other historic concerns so I’m hopeful that we’ll work on that amendment and have it ready [for next year’s session],” Saldaña said.
In Washington, there are more than 156,000 people employed who are not legally authorized to work in the U.S. due to their immigration status, according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute. Many work in industries such as agriculture, hospitality, construction, and retail.
“It’s a policy decision by the federal government to not address the immigration status of people who have long ties to the places where they live,” said Antonio Ginatta, policy director at Columbia Legal Services, a nonprofit legal aid group.
Immigrants contribute to the tax system both indirectly and directly by paying sales, property, and payroll taxes, Ginatta noted.
Payroll taxes are withheld by an employer regardless of someone’s immigration status and go to support Social Security and unemployment insurance, which is jointly financed by the state and federal government.
In Washington, immigrants who are not legally authorized to work in the U.S. contributed nearly $1 billion to state and local taxes in 2022, according to estimates from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
‘Just not the year’
Money to fund the proposed program in Washington would have come from existing tax payments made by employers through an administrative charge collected by the state, with no impact on the state’s operating budget, said Ginatta.
But faced with a multibillion-dollar deficit, Democratic leadership indicated that this is not a year for creating new programs.
“Unfortunately, that is the case with the [unemployment insurance] proposal for undocumented Washingtonians,” House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-Seattle, said recently. “I think that the work that has gone into it will bear fruit in future years, but this is just not the year that we’re going to see a lot of new benefits.”
Saldaña acknowledged as much. “The budget concerns generally are making it much harder for us to do anything that’s considered new even if the funding that we’re trying to allocate to it isn’t really general funds,” she said.
Advocates plan to keep pressing for the program, saying it would provide a needed safety net for a population that contributes to the state’s economy.
“The idea of employers hiring undocumented workers, it’s the reality, and it’s been the reality in the United States for decades and decades,” Ginatta said. “We want to make sure there are programs to take care of these folks when they are unemployed through no fault of their own.”