Aging in the shadows: Spotlighting the challenges facing Illinois’ aging undocumented population

The Chicago Tribune and Injustice Watch teamed up to report on the challenges facing Illinois’ aging undocumented population in a four-part series of stories focused on access to health care and housing.

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.

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More than 9,000 seniors enrolled in the Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults program in its first year — three times as many as advocates had estimated would benefit from the program when they lobbied for the bill in Springfield in spring 2020. But the carve-outs for extended care and at-home health care still leave a critical gap in coverage, health experts say.

“The numbers (of enrollees) show the need of this population often living under the shadow. It also shows the potential crisis that this can cause if this issue is not addressed by our leaders in the state, but also federally,” Eréndira Rendón, an organizer with Healthy Illinois, said.

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With rising costs of living and without a social safety net, undocumented seniors often depend on their families to have a roof over their head. And those without families to take care of them are at high risk of ending up on the street.

Burdening their children and families with having care for them in their later years can elicit feelings of shame and guilt in undocumented seniors, said Cecilia Ayón, a public policy analyst at the University of California, Riverside, who recently interviewed dozens of undocumented older adults as part of her research.

“When it comes to retirement, you have to think about the intersection of how long can they work for and how much of a burden they want to be on their children. Because that’s actually how they talked about it — they don’t want to be a burden on their children,” she said.

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Illinois is home to nearly 200,000 undocumented immigrants age 35 to 54, according to census data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute. That means every year over the next few decades, thousands more undocumented seniors will be working to the bone without being able to retire; in desperate need of immediate and long-term health care; and frantically searching for safe affordable housing.

Advocates say Illinois lawmakers should build state-funded welfare programs for undocumented seniors that mirror those already in place for citizens, like food stamps and unemployment insurance. Illinois has taken a similar approach with a new health care program for low-income immigrant adults who don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid.

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