CHICAGO — Editors’ note: Injustice Watch and Chicago Tribune teamed up to report on the challenges facing Illinois’ aging undocumented population in a series of stories focused on access to health care and housing. This is the first story in the series.
In a cold basement apartment on the Southwest Side, Gregorio Pillado and Martina Alonso count pennies and pray for relief.
Pillado, 79, has been working at a nearby meatpacking plant for 20 years, lifting thousands of pounds of frozen meats into large vats, eight hours a day, five days a week. His $16 an hour pretax is the married couple’s only source of income. With it, they manage to pay for their groceries, medicines, utilities and their $800 monthly rent – but not much else.
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The nonprofit news outlet Injustice Watch provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
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Alonso, 69, used to bring in money by catering small parties and selling bags of chopped-up nopales (prickly pear), but she had to stop after she fell and injured her wrist months ago.
Pillado’s health has declined dramatically over the last few years. First he had to get a pacemaker implanted. Then he had surgery to remove a hernia. Now he has another hernia, but he doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to get it removed. His health problems make him incapable of handling his old workloads, and he worries about if – or when – he’ll get fired.
‘Ya no tengo la misma fuerza y energía que antes.’ I don’t have the same strength or energy as I once did, Pillado said.
‘Se me quita el sueño cuando me pongo a pensar en qué pasaría si Gregorio perdiera su trabajo.’ Alonso said she loses sleep ruminating over what would happen if her husband of 50 years lost his job.
Pillado and Alonso have no savings, no retirement plan and no authorization to live in the U.S.
They’re far from alone. There are at least 3,900 undocumented immigrants age 65 and older living in Illinois. But by 2030, the number of undocumented seniors in the state will top 55,000 – a 1,300% increase in just a decade, according to a report published by Rush University Medical Center last year.
Most undocumented immigrants arrived in the country decades ago and have lived here without a viable pathway to citizenship. Mexican immigrants will make up two-thirds of the undocumented older adult populations in Illinois, followed by immigrants from Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeastern Asia, and Central America.
Now, this generation of immigrants faces the prospect of having lived and died in the shadows. Undocumented immigrants are blocked from accessing social programs that many seniors rely on, such as food stamps, public housing, Medicare and Social Security Insurance – programs that they pay billions of dollars into every year. Their families and communities weave a patchwork of formal and informal resources to make up the difference.
‘The social cost for families of these older adults not having access to services that they desperately need is huge,’ said Padraic Stanley, a program coordinator and social worker at Rush and one of the report’s lead authors.
Read More: Crisis of older undocumented workers awaits Illinois