A number of high-profile Democratic lawmakers in New York are pressuring Governor Hochul to extend health care coverage to immigrants in the country illegally, and they have a novel selling point: New Yorkers won’t have to pay the tab, as taxpayers elsewhere in the country would be picking up the bill.

Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent a letter to Ms. Hochul this week asking her to develop a plan that would allow the federal government to cover undocumented workers in the state. “We believe that healthcare is a human right, regardless of immigration status,” the two members of Congress wrote. 

The campaign to get these immigrants federally subsidized health care, the “Coverage for All” movement, says Ms. Hochul can request federal dollars from the Biden administration for the initiative. Washington state and Colorado received such waivers, which allow them to use Medicaid funds to insure immigrants, and the subsequent federal funds last year. 

Before Mr. Nadler and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mayor Adams also called on Ms. Hochul to develop such a proposal. In a letter to the governor, Mr. Adams said coverage of these immigrants would help drive down costs because they would no longer have to use emergency services and drain hospital resources. Statewide, there are about 400,000 illegal immigrants who do not have health insurance, according to immigrants-rights groups.

In his letter, Mr. Adams blamed the lack of action on the proposal on “structural barriers, rooted in racism and bias, that perpetuate disparate health outcomes in immigrant communities.” 

The deadline for Ms. Hochul’s budget proposal was April 1, but she has yet to deliver. She has said that she would not include a proposal for a health care expansion for immigrants, though these politicians are hoping to slide it in at the last moment. 

The campaign marks the latest steps in Democrats’ long march to the left in the hopes of appeasing immigration advocates. The party failed to get immigration reform near the top of President Obama’s agenda in 2009 during his first term, and once the Tea Party was swept into office in 2010, there was little hope of revisiting the issue.

The remaining years of the Obama administration saw stalled negotiations with members of Congress, leading him to issue a 2012 executive order called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which established new protections for illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. 

Following President Trump’s immigration and border policies, many Democrats moved even further toward establishing legal protections and benefits for illegal immigrants. In a 2020 Democratic presidential primary debate, when asked if they would decriminalize crossing the southern border, two-thirds of the candidates raised their hands in support of the idea. 

During the first two years of the Biden administration, immigration advocates say little progress has been made. According to a study from the Migration Policy Institute, the courts and events in Latin and Central America have made it harder to control the flow of illegal immigrants.

Between 2021 and 2022, deportations increased to 72,100 from 59,000. That is still far lower than during both the Obama and Trump administrations, which saw average annual deportation levels at 344,000 and 233,000 respectively.