On Nov. 1, Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order GA-46 went into effect. This order does not bar healthcare for undocumented people but it is designed to intimidate them out of seeking healthcare when they need it through threats of reporting. Is this a sincere effort by Abbott to protect the state’s healthcare system, or is this another racist political stunt to demonize and attack the most vulnerable?
What is GA-46?
GA-46 requires all of Texas’ public hospitals to document and report the legal immigration status of patients seeking inpatient and emergency care. Public hospitals will be required to regularly report relevant data to the Texas state government.
This executive order scapegoats immigrants as a drain on the Texas healthcare system, part of a series of anti-immigrant attacks from across the entire U.S. ruling-class political spectrum.
Abbott’s order targets a population that is already enveloped in healthcare insecurity. Policies like GA-46 cause a chilling effect that can stop people from seeking healthcare, even when they have the right to receive these services as federal and state benefits. Ensuring that all people have access to healthcare is important to prevent public health crises.
The far right has based their restriction of services on the lie that immigrants are a burden to public infrastructure. But tying state hospitals up in Abbott’s anti-immigrant bureaucracy is not actually going to help the state’s hospital systems, which faced increasing crises during the mishandled COVID-19 pandemic. Insufficient wages and extreme workloads caused by the capitalist system, not immigrants, are to blame.
In 2021, a poll found that around 30% of healthcare workers were considering leaving their professions, with many others opting for retirement following the pressures put on by the pandemic. In 2022, nurse turnover rates in Texas hospitals reached as high as 25%, antagonizing the already-inflamed operational processes of Texas hospitals, and setting the stage for a public health crisis.
To make matters worse, Texas has been going after any poor residents who receive any services. Some 19% of Texans lack some kind of medical insurance. Since April 2023, Texas has cut 2 million residents from its Medicaid program. These cuts perpetuate a dangerous trend that disproportionately affects low-income and immigrant families. The systemic nature of capitalism – not immigrants – is the real burden on healthcare.
Behind the racism: denial of healthcare to all
Having no solutions of their own, the Texas far right under Abbott is desperate to pin the rising costs of healthcare on anyone but the capitalists themselves. In August, Abbott attempted to blame healthcare costs on Democrats’ “open border policies.” Abbott went on to say, “Texans should not have to shoulder the burden of financially supporting medical care for illegal immigrants.”
This characterization of immigrants as a “burden” on Texas is racist and false. The only financial “burden” on Texas’ healthcare system is self-imposed by the state government. The Texas Legislature has declined repeatedly to pass legislation that would expand Medicaid coverage to low-income adults and qualifying immigrant families and allow Texas hospitals to receive federal Medicaid funding via SSA Title XIX/Medicaid funds. These provisions would not only guarantee many more Texans healthcare: they would directly fund financial costs for immigrant populations seeking emergency care. The state’s refusal to accept funds is an act of cruelty that undercuts healthcare standards for all people, undocumented or not.
Acts like GA-46 add to the bureaucratic, capitalist red tape that exists to deny, withhold, and obstruct healthcare access to the vulnerable.
Democrats have postured as the more “progressive” option, but the last election cycle saw the abandonment of immigrant communities and the complete acceptance of far-right “tough on the border” anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Democratic Party.
The Democrats and Republicans have shown that they are incapable of addressing the compounding crises facing working-class Americans. They are out of ideas, and have resorted to age-old tactics of racist fearmongering and working-class division. It is precisely this vulgar, extreme swing to the right by the U.S. political establishment that makes the need to organize outside the narrow confines of these two corporate parties – a mass movement for the vast expansion of our social, political, and economic rights, that can challenge both of the capitalist parties – so necessary.
