An undocumented worker was able to pay rent because he got $2,000 as part of a UBI-like program that will now be permanent for Coloradans who lose their jobs

• Leo Alvarez received $2,000 from a pandemic-era fund for undocumented workers who lost wages in 2020.
• The fund has led to a permanent unemployment assistance program for undocumented workers in Denver.

Leo Alvarez had a confluence of bad luck in 2020.

Due to the pandemic, the bakery where he works in Denver, Colorado, cut his hours. The hours he could work were painful ones, due to his arthritis. It's been a year since he started working regularly again, although he's still suffering from medical complications.

Because Alvarez is an undocumented immigrant, he wasn't eligible for much of the federal coronavirus aid that helped many Americans who were struggling, boosting the savings of many households when circumstances were at their most dire. Alvarez asked that his real name be kept private, but his identity has been verified by Insider.

It left Alvarez and his family, which includes his wife and teenage daughter, in a precarious position two years ago. Friends told them about community programs that could give them free food, but it didn't cover everything. They were also falling behind on rent.

Then Alvarez found out about the Left Behind Workers Fund, for which he gives his "eternal gratitude."

The fund was a pandemic-era initiative launched by Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock, which in total provided about $1.73 million in emergency funds to families who lost income due to COVID-19.

What made the fund rare was that it was specifically geared toward residents who did not qualify for federal and state assistance — families like Alvarez's. Alvarez received two payments of $1,000, and it helped him pay his rent at a time when he couldn't generate any income. Based on Denver's program, Colorado is now launching a "wage-replacement" program for all residents who lose their jobs regardless of immigration status, called the Benefit Recovery Fund, which will offer direct cash payments to recently unemployed people.

"Colorado employers have paid nearly $188 million in unemployment insurance premiums on behalf of Colorado workers without work authorization," AidKit, the third-party platform running the program, said in a statement. "Yet these workers are ineligible for unemployment assistance when they lose their jobs through no fault of their own."

Alvarez said he's glad that the program is becoming permanent.

"It was a huge help and it helped us to also not feel so forgotten," he told Insider.

The gap in pandemic-era aid highlights social safety net inequality

Colorado's upcoming program is the "first of its kind in the US," Kristina Leal, a spokesperson for AidKit, told Insider.

The kind of aid Denver provided to undocumented residents was highly uncommon in the first place. In one of the only other similar programs in the country, New York also allocated funds to help undocumented workers in April 2021, and it was notable for its size — the state committed over $2 billion of its budget for an estimated 290,000 undocumented workers — and the level of compensation, which "approaches what others got in unemployment insurance," according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The US is four years into the pandemic, and undocumented workers have been hit disproportionately hard, both financially and in terms of exposure to COVID, according to the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. More than five million essential workers in the US are undocumented immigrants, CAP estimates. And while they only make up 3.2% of the population, they are 4.4% of the country's workforce.

"There's a lot of people who need help even though we don't always see it," Alvarez said.

Advocates have been pushing for states to expand unemployment benefits for undocumented workers, highlighting the way that the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities based on immigration status. Several states have proposed the creation of "excluded worker funds" like the ones in New York and Denver in the last two years, as well as stipulations for undocumented workers' rights and wage protections in states like Colorado and Pennsylvania.

In New York for instance, advocates want the state to make its fund for undocumented workers permanent.

"This is not something that's a luxury," Jessica Maxwell of the Workers Center of Central New York told Spectrum News last month. "These are workers who are the backbone of our economy. Domestic workers, construction workers, farmworkers."