Two ways California aids undocumented immigrants

California is home to more than 10 million immigrants, nearly one-fourth of the nation’s entire foreign-born population. The vast majority were born in Mexico, Latin America and Asia.

In 2022, about 54% of California’s immigrants were U.S. citizens, compared to only 31% in 1990, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California. And the number of undocumented immigrants is estimated at 1.85 million in 2021, down from 2.8 million in 2007, says the Pew Research Center.

Still, it’s how the state treats and helps undocumented immigrants that is the focus of the policy debate and, often, the political controversy.

The latest flashpoint is a new state law that provides Medi-Cal coverage to all undocumented people, regardless of age. Earlier this month, Republican Assemblymembers Devon Mathis of Visilia and Bill Essayli of Corona traded barbs with one another on social media, after Mathis published an op-ed backing the law. 

As CalMatters health reporter Ana B. Ibarra explains, Mathis’ support for Medi-Cal expansion signals how the political debate has changed. Twenty years ago, offering undocumented immigrants health benefits would have been politically risky for both parties. But a combination of more Latinos in politics; past state budget surpluses; a pandemic that highlighted glaring health inequities; and growing recognition of the role undocumented workers play in California’s economy has gradually shifted public opinion.

• Mathis, to CalMatters: “I grew up in one of the poorest areas of the state, in a highly Latino area; these are common things that we see and that we know. I did the op-ed because I’m sick and tired of one, people on the hard right trying to make everyone sound like them, and two, to just say stop the rhetoric for five minutes and look at the actual issue.”

But Essayli, whose Assembly Bill 1783 proposes to pull funding from health care expansions for undocumented residents, wrote in his own op-ed that Republicans who support the law risk “being complicit in the financial decay of our state.”

• Essayli: “As the son of immigrant parents who came to this country by legal means, I was outraged our state government would earmark billions in funding for the healthcare of foreign nationals when our own citizens cannot afford their healthcare.”

For more on the California GOP butting heads over Medi-Cal expansion, read Ana’s story.

A 2023 law isn’t having the impact supporters hoped. The measure repealed the citizenship requirement to become a police officer, targeting recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a federal program for more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

But despite a severe shortage of law enforcement officers, not many have been hired, reports Justo Robles of CalMatters’ California Divide team.

Mexican-born, 26-year-old Ernesto Moron, is one of about only a dozen California law officers who got jobs through the law. As an officer with the UC Davis Police Department, he wants to “help other people that are in my same shoes.” 

But not many people are. Some of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Bakersfield, said they haven’t hired any new officers under the law. The slow adoption could be traced to the early opposition the law faced, including legal concerns over whether a non-citizen can possess a firearm. 

To learn more about this issue, read Justo’s story. 

From CalMatters economy reporter Levi Sumagaysay: 

Legalizing sports betting in California has lost again — this time before it could even really get started. 

The backers of two proposed sports-betting initiatives admitted defeat on Tuesday. The measures — which were filed with the attorney general last year and had not begun to collect the 874,641 signatures required to get on the November ballot — proposed giving exclusive rights to in-person and online sports gambling to the state’s tribes. Tribes voiced their opposition soon after the measures’ introduction.

“We thought we had a great plan to unite tribes around one sports bill,” Kasey Thompson, one of the businessmen behind both initiatives, told CalMatters Tuesday. Instead, he acknowledged that the measures divided tribes — gaming tribes vs. non-gaming tribes that are entitled to revenue sharing from tribal gaming.

Thompson said he and the measures’ other main backer, Reeve Collins, were co-founders of Pala Interactive, an online gaming platform that was majority-owned by the state’s Pala Band of Mission Indians before it was sold to Boyd Gaming for $170 million in 2022. 

“I thought we were doing something great for Indian Country,” he said of their proposed ballot measures.

But James Siva, chairman of the 52-tribe California Nations Indian Gaming Association, warned others who might want to try again, saying “using tribes for your own gain will get you nowhere.”

• Siva, in a statement: “We are pleased that in the face of widespread tribal opposition, the backers of two initiatives have kept their word and withdrawn what we could only regard as a cynical attempt to legalize sports wagering and online betting in California.” 

Jacob Mejia, spokesperson for the Pechanga Band of Indians, alluded to a possible future for legalized sports gaming, saying Tuesday that “leaders can now focus on a real and inclusive path forward that prioritizes tribal communities throughout the state.”

This isn’t the first time efforts to legalize sports betting in California have failed. In 2022, the state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected a pair of dueling ballot measures proposing to legalize sports betting. The backers of Propositions 26 and 27 broke records by spending more than $400 million combined. Prop. 26 would have legalized sports gambling at tribal casinos and was backed by the state’s largest gaming tribes, while Prop. 27 would have allowed online sports gambling and was backed by big casinos and online sports-betting operators such as DraftKings.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports gambling in 2018, betting on sports has been legalized in more than 30 states and Washington, D.C.

During the three-and-a-half years of the pandemic, five million people, or about 1 in 8 Californians, waited for unemployment payments from the California Employment Development Department. At the time, the state’s job safety net program was overwhelmed with millions of new applicants and plagued with operational issues and widespread fraud. 

Since then, California has launched a five-year, $1.2 billion overhaul of the program, known as EDDNext. But besides fixing its nuts and bolts, what would meaningful change look like?

At a CalMatters event on Tuesday, moderated by investigative reporter Lauren Hepler, three panelists discussed how the department could deliver assistance to millions of vulnerable Californians efficiently and sustainably for years to come. (Note that the agency declined an invitation to participate.)

Daniela Urban, Center for Workers’ Rights founder and executive director, asserted that the maximum amount of $450 that eligible workers can receive weekly is “too low” to keep up with the cost of living.

• Urban: “It doesn’t reflect our current workforce and our current economic conditions…. The amount that you receive on unemployment insurance hasn’t increased since 2014.”

But increasing benefits is a huge hurdle when the unemployment insurance fund is $20 billion in debt to the federal government. Though there are some possibilities — borrowing more money from the feds or increasing taxes on employers, for instance — none are ideal, according to Michael Bernick, an employment and labor lawyer and former EDD director.

• Bernick: “Back in the early 2000s the fund was flush, we had a $6.5 billion surplus…. But we never increased the other side in terms of the amount of money coming in…. The question becomes: Who pays for this?”

The program also needs to address fraud, which cost California hundreds of millions of dollars during the pandemic. To avoid more scams, the state denied or delayed payments to Californians, such as Burbank video editor Madeline Maye, who genuinely needed the cash. Maye lost benefit money after unknown charges were made on her EDD debit card. Though she received the money back months later, after spending hours on the phone with EDD representatives and reaching out to her local officials, Maye said it was “one of the worst experiences of my life.”

• Maye: “I feel like with everything that happened, a random check for $500, to me, is not closure. Wider closure (would be) just getting a system that really works.”

If you missed the panel, here’s the video.

More CalMatters events: The next one is scheduled for Feb. 13 on school battles over book bans and forced outing policies. 

Sen. Tom Umberg’s measure to allow criminal court proceedings to be held via video through Jan. 1, 2026, is a one-year extension of an existing, pandemic-era rule set to expire by the end of this year. But if it were up to the Democrat from Santa Ana, he’d make the ability to attend hearings remotely permanent.

• Umberg: “Remote access is a way to be able to reduce costs and create greater accessibility, particularly to those who are indigent.”

As CalMatters Digital Democracy reporter Ryan Sabalow explains, Umber believes allowing people to “Zoom” into hearings helps address the state’s backlogged court system. People also don’t have to take time off work to travel to courthouses, and lawyers can bill clients less, minusing the time to drive to hearings. 

Despite these benefits, legislation to make the practice permanent has received pushback from the influential Service Employees International Union California. It represents 15,000 trial court workers, and argues that video hearings make it difficult for court reporters to create accurate transcripts. Other opponents say that video calls also may erode the integrity of the criminal justice system.

• Lesli Caldwell, California Public Defenders Association, during a Senate public safety committee hearing: “Too many things cannot be clear in a video call, such as overall demeanor, physical cues of emotional richness and the possibility of off-camera coaching. Video evidence leads to dehumanization … of both witnesses and defendants.”

For more on Umberg’s bill, which passed out of committee earlier this month, read Ryan’s story. 

In other legislative news: Lawmakers passed a bill this week that removes barriers for pharmacists to distribute PrEP, a preventative HIV medication, to patients without a prescription. The bill’s author, San Francisco Democrat Sen. Scott Wiener, called it an “essential part of any strategy” to prevent 4,000 HIV infections a year in California. The measure builds on a 2019 law, increasing the supply amount from 60 to 90 days, and requiring health plans to cover related pharmacist services when furnishing the medication. It now heads to the governor’s desk.

And Democratic Sen. Melissa Hurtado of Bakersfield and Assemblymember Miguel Santiago of Los Angeles gathered with advocates at the state Capitol Tuesday seeking to expand eligibility to CalFresh, the state’s food program for low-income families, for undocumented Californians aged 54 and under. Both legislators last year introduced twin bills that would have lowered the eligibility age range, but the measures were held at the requests of the lawmakers.