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Legislative sources say New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is negotiating a deal on health care coverage for undocumented New Yorkers, but she has a vastly different cost estimate for the program, which has prevented it from moving forward. Lawmakers have said that extending the Essential Plan — a state-funded insurance option for low-income New Yorkers — to undocumented immigrants would cost about $345 million. But Hochul’s team told lawmakers they put the cost at $1.9 billion in the first year. City & State NY
In other local immigration news…
An Outdated System is Preventing Street Vendors From Getting Permits
📍Documented Original
Peréz has spent nearly 25 years trying to get a food vendor permit, which is required to legally sell food from a cart on the streets of New York City. She said the police have fined her multiple times in the past for not having a permit.“The [authorities] know that the permits are not available, so why do they keep targeting us?” she said. Peréz has a mobile food vending license, which allows her to prepare and serve food, but she has not been able to obtain a vending permit. Permits were severely limited until last year, when the New York City Council passed legislation to add 4,000 supervisory licenses — permits attached to a person rather than a cart — over the next decade, starting in July of this year. Read more on Documented
How the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 Upheld Controversial Immigration Quotas
📍Documented Original
The latest addition to Documented’s Glossary — a resource guide full of information on the U.S. immigration system — is a detailed examination of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. Rather than fix the controversial policies in place before the 1950s that favored immigrants from northern and western European countries, the INA reinforced them by upholding and codifying a quota system that allowed more immigrants from countries with larger populations already in the U.S. and disallowed those who weren’t already in the country. Continue reading on Documented