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The historic and newly reenergized movement for an improved and expanded Medicare for all residents in the United States and its Territories and the current volcanic eruption for full human rights for people who enter the United States without permission, seeking work, have crossed paths at a fault line called white supremacy and institutional racism.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) is a major player in this new and historic drama.

Mr. Conyers has been in Congress for over 40 years; he is now the chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. In the past, he gave us the King Bill that resulted in the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday. He has been the hardest working congressperson ever on the chronic abuse of human rights associated with the sordid practice of police brutality in people of color communities throughout the United States. In addition, Mr. Conyers, against the judgment of his closest advisers at the time, stepped forward and introduced a reparations Bill to study the injuries to Black people of African descent related to chattel slavery and de jure and de facto racism, the role of the United States in creating and perpetuating these injuries, and what remedial actions are appropriate.

Accordingly, it should be of no surprise to human rights activists that Mr. Conyers has introduced, what he has described, as the most important piece of legislation in his career; H.R. 676, “The United States National Health Insurance Act” Or “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.” The relevant section of the Act for this discussion states…All individuals residing in the United States (including any territory of the United States) are covered under the USNHI Program entitling them to a universal, best quality standard of care. This means that under H.R. 676, so called “illegal aliens” will have the same full healthcare coverage that citizens of the United States will have.

The above-cited section of H.R. 676 is the boldest assault on the prerogatives of white supremacy and institutional racism since the assault on Jim Crow. A brief tour of US history will not only explain why, but it will also demonstrate why the supporters of H.R. 676 must not abandon the human rights of undocumented residents of the United States, in the face of what is expected to be a massive racist attack to excise this language from H.R. 676.

In Lerone Bennett Jr.’s exhaustive study of Abraham Lincoln, Forced Into Glory, Dr. Bennett reminds the reader that Abraham Lincoln first became famous as an “Indian” killer. He also states that “…[Lincoln]was reduced out of anguish and out of fear of the future of the human condition, to projecting a world without the African-American whom he wanted to eliminate, not by actual murder, but by the symbolic murder of banishment.” Lincoln had opposed slavery in order to eliminate the very presence of African people in the non-slave holding states and to implement his policy of forced deportation of Africans out of the United States.  Hence, Lincoln’s final solution to the problem of the “slaves” and freed Africans becomes the first known and official articulation of a US government policy of ethnic cleansing.

The practice of keeping America pure white has become interchangeably over time both the overt and covert strategy that became and still is the sub-text for immigration public policy in the United States. Obviously, the first overt act was the government sponsored genocide of indigenous people. Another overt act was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This federal law created, for the first time in US history, the concept of “illegal immigrants.”

In 1924, Congress passed the National Origins Quota Act that set quotas encouraging immigration from England, Germany, and Scandinavia, but strictly limited immigration from eastern and southern Europe. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act that severely limited immigration from each country of Asia while encouraging immigrants from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany to fill 70 percent of the annual immigration quota. It was not until the tumult of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s that the National Origins Quota system was abolished and replaced with a policy that permitted a maximum of 20,000 immigrants from each country to enter the United States.

Nevertheless, this change did not change the institutional racist character of immigration policy that favored the global north, nor has it dampened the appetite of businesses and middle to upper class US citizens to exploit, severely, the labor of undocumented immigrants from the global south who are compelled to enter the United States, seeking a better life.

Why do these people come here without permission?  And why should US citizens care about their healthcare needs? The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are 12 million immigrants in the US who do not have the permission of the United States to be here.

Hence they are considered “illegal.”

After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994, an estimated 6 million Mexicans left farming because Mexican grain producers could not compete with cheap, government-subsidized wheat and maze from the United States and Canada. As a result, the real wages of Mexicans have tanked, due to the super-exploitation of Mexican farmers by the multinational corporations. It is precisely these neo-liberal policies that are pushing immigration and there is no end in sight. Indeed, Mexicans are being driven off their land to a land nearby that was taken from them in the first place and where they are now considered illegal and denied basic human rights. Undocumented immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia are finding themselves in substantially the same boat.

Documented immigrants, as a group, have far less access to healthcare than non-immigrants. For example, they must be residents in the U.S. for five years before they are eligible for Medicaid and the State Children Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Further, access to healthcare for the undocumented is dire. For example, the undocumented are barred from ever receiving Medicaid and Medicare. The undocumented are also reluctant to use federally funded emergency health services because of fear, and confusion over eligibility rules.

They as a group are most likely to be impoverished. They work disproportionately in the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, without safety rules or protections, and for the longest hours and for the lowest wages. Accordingly, due to severe poverty relative to citizens, their diet is relatively poor, their housing disproportionately substandard and unhealthy and the resultant negative impact of these conditions on their physical and mental health is the most severe on any population in the United States. They are suffering and dying in silence.

Further, the federal policies that restrict healthcare access to immigrants, regardless of their immigrant status, have no impact whatever on ending the healthcare crisis in this country nor do they deter immigration to the United States. In fact, these policies demonstrably exacerbate the healthcare crisis in the United States.

The California Immigrant Policy Center reports that these restrictive federal policies endanger individual and public health, increase healthcare costs, the prime cause of the crises. Inevitably, these policies harm U.S. citizen children. According to the U.S. census data, 85% of immigrant families with children are mixed status, with at least one immigrant parent and at least one citizen child.

Their reality of severe healthcare insecurity is that much more unforgiving because undocumented immigrants contribute more to the US public coffers in taxes than they cost in social services. In addition, the dominant view of leading economists is that undocumented immigrants make a net contribution to the U.S. economy.

Despite incontrovertible empirical evidence that non-citizen immigrants in the United States benefit the economy of this country, not providing them meaningful access to healthcare actually increases public health threats as it simultaneously deepens the healthcare crisis in this country. Finally, H.R. 676 will provide all residents guaranteed healthcare access more cheaply and at a better quality than the present failed system. Advocates for H.R. 676 are appropriately worried that the right wing will seek, if all else fails, to prohibit H.R. 676 from covering the undocumented.

In the 2005-2006 congressional session, federal lawmakers attempted to pass immigration legislation (the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005) that would have made it a criminal offense to provide medical care to undocumented immigrants. This legislation would have made it a felony to provide food, shelter, or other assistance to undocumented immigrants. This Hitlerian legislation passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. The dramatic upsurge in the immigrant rights movement was a decisive factor in the defeat of this unconscionable legislation.

But we can not rest. Undocumented immigrants are being scapegoated for the ills of society. In this post 9/11 world, they are deemed a security threat, a source of diseases and street crimes, and a drain on the economy. In the 2005-2006 Congress, bills, justified by these false notions, were floated that, if passed, would have forcibly deported all undocumented immigrants. All of these notions are baseless, with the exception that they are based at their core on racial stereotypes, the desire of the greedy to exploit the weak, and the determination of the political elite class to ethnically cleanse the United States.

White Supremacy rarely speaks in its own name. It prefers to get its way by obfuscation, through its elegant and powerful use of the “high-minded” rhetoric of “war on terror”, “war and drugs”, “war on crime”, “war on poverty”. The reality is that it is an unrelenting “war on us.”

H.R. 676 will give all of us a fighting chance to come out of poverty, resist economic exploitation, and to participate fully in society because we will no longer have the onerous burden of healthcare insecurity and the severe health injuries to ourselves and families that always result.

Human rights are indivisible and human beings are not illegal. A denial of human rights to one is a denial of human rights to all of us. I call on all immigrants to join the movement to win passage of H.R.676. Your fight is our fight. For more information of how you can help win passage of HR 676, contact Healthcare-NOW at www.Healthcare-Now.org or call us at 1800-453-1305. Order our free Spanish version brochure Improved Medicare For All (Single Payer). 

The coming together of the immigrant rights movement and the movement for an expanded and improved Medicare for all (everybody in, nobody out) will ensure our collective victory.

We want to hear from you.

Mr. Sankofa is a human rights public policy specialist and community organizer. He is a national organizer for Healthcare-Now. He is also the strategic planning consultant for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, Legal Defense, Research, and Education Fund. As a former trial attorney, specializing in complex institutional reform litigation, Mr. Sankofa, directed the AIDS Project of the National Prison Project of the ACLU Foundation. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine and the Antioch School of Law. Raised in Washington, DC, Mr. Sankofa now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Click here to contact Ajamu K. Sankofa, Esq. and Healthcare-NOW. 

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