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The COVID pandemic drew attention to longstanding disparities in health care by race and immigration status, prompting states like Oregon, Illinois, and California to provide health insurance to undocumented immigrants with their own funds. This talk examines efforts within Colorado to expand Medicaid to undocumented immigrants and to make Emergency Medicaid more accessible. It explores the challenges that Trumpian policies have posed to these efforts as well as practices of bureaucratic disentitlement in a new receiving area, and concludes with potential counter-strategies.
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Engaging with Worker Relief Funds: Countering Immigrant Exclusion during the Pandemic
In March of 2021, undocumented workers in New York state held public hunger strikes to call attention to the essential nature of their work during the pandemic and to demand that Governor Cuomo develop a fund to extend financial relief to “left behind workers,” undocumented workers otherwise ineligible for federal or state unemployment relief. These protests, organized by immigrant rights groups like Make the Road New York, were highly visible ways for undocumented workers to emphasize the embodied sacrifices they make through their labor in the U.S. economy, and they resulted in the New York legislature allocating $2.1 billion to an Excluded Worker Fund. As engaged anthropologists involved with Excluded Worker Funds in our respective states (Oregon and Colorado) since late spring of 2020, the protests in New York—and the national media attention they garnered—caught our attention, especially since the programs we have been working alongside for the past year-plus have received relatively little media or scholarly attention. Our goal in this SfAA News piece is to reflect on the policy potential of EWFs as a mode of social care and inclusion for undocumented community members and on the implications of our involvement with these funds as engaged, activist anthropologists.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1827397
- PAR ID:
- 10345110
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Society for Applied Anthropology News
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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