The breath-takingly huge American Rescue Plan bill passed last month by Congress and signed by Joe Biden is doling out a total of nearly two trillion dollars in stimulus funds, here, there, and everywhere. A good portion of that money–one hundred billion in round numbers–is going to Andrew Cuomo’s State of New York. What is the Empire State planning to do with its windfall?
According to the City Journal website, Governor Cuomo and Company will hand over $2.1 billion of it to illegal aliens, whom they now euphemistically call “excluded workers,” i.e. those workers not covered by unemployment insurance. While that term makes them sound like the usual victims of neglect, there’s a reason why persons illegally here are “excluded”: it’s against federal law.
But as we know, in today’s America, laws exist for politicians to pick and choose, according to the requirements of their agenda. In the eyes of the pols who run New York, laws prohibiting illegals from receiving unemployment compensation are bad and can be safely disregarded. For that reason, the State has created the Excluded Workers Fund, which will “provide retroactive benefits to illegal aliens not eligible to receive federal CARES Act money or unemployment insurance.”
Funds will be meted out to individuals at two different levels:
- Applicants who claim to have lost a job due to the COVID-related shutdown will receive $15,600 each.
- All other applicants will get $3,200.
Originally, the vast pool of the “excluded” was to have included 40,000 recently freed jail or prison inmates, “released from incarceration or immigrant detention before or during the pandemic with little-to-no chances of finding a job.” That however, according to City Journal, was too much “for all but the wokest state legislators,” and had to be scratched. The battle over the merely illegal–as opposed to what you might call the “criminally illegal”–was tough enough, with upstate Dems pleading with NYC hard leftists and being called “white supremacists” in return.
The name calling, along with a “hunger strike” stunt put on by a hard-left group called Make the Road, did the trick, however, and the upstate “moderates” relented. After all, the $100 billion in federal money was free of charge, wasn’t it?
Even “lifelong liberal” readers of the NY Times have fretted over the wisdom of this massive–and manifestly illegal–payout, calling it a “gift to the Republicans.” Though we bet the Republicans will be too fearful of being branded “racist” to make much of it.
For more, see the City Journal website.