During the pandemic, many paperless workers lost their job. They were non-citizens, due to which they didn’t qualify for the incentive checks which the leading Democrats gave. After seeing this situation, the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, decided to give taxpayer money to such people. Now, Cuomo and other New York politicians are suggesting a plan to provide a one-time payment of $15,600 to the immigrants who lost their jobs in pandemic to help them. Apart from this, Lawmakers also accepted a $2.1 billion fund to help those who didn’t get incentive checks in F2020 and 2021. The fund is a small part of the state’s new $212 billion budget agreement that was agreed to five days after its April 1 deadline. The best thing about this fund is that it will give a helping hand to about 300,000 jobless people in New York who lost their jobs because of Covid-19 and are also not qualified for other stimulus money because of their non-citizenship. Many democrats were separated because of this fund in the budget as the progressive democrats only wanted to support the immigrant. But the conservative democrats wanted to save taxpayer money for the country’s citizens.
However, protestors made their voices heard when advocating for the relief fund. They held protests outside of government buildings and even hosted hunger strikes to show lawmakers that they were serious about changing the state budget. Cuomo, on Wednesday, in a briefing, said that that New Yorkers need to show “compassion” for people who are suffering during the pandemic but did not qualify for federal relief. According to the Daily Mail, workers need to prove their eligibility to get the relief money. In this way, they will be able to qualify for state-issued IDs, school transcripts, wage statements, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, utility bills, bank statements, pay stubs, and a letter from the company. Cuomo also said that “Just because you are undocumented doesn’t mean we don’t care and we don’t have compassion, and we don’t want to help.” However, He cared about the undocumented worker’s relief fund as they might attract fraud.
The governor of New York said that “It is not easy to do it in a way that can be managed without fraud, and that is an important thing for us that we save every tax dollar.” There was a huge fraud even after taking the significant measures in an unemployment insurance plan which we started this fund for the citizens. We will ask the administrator to review it before in which they will check the state funds. After the program is started, the administrator will come back and check and then said you did this wrong, and so on.”
