Medicaid cuts, mass deportations, and billionaire tax breaks—Congress is making choices that hurt working families. Representative Jimmy Gomez (CA-34) sits down with Who Cares to discuss his fight for caregivers, immigrant rights, and labor protections in Washington. Hear about his in-home and nursing home caregiver mother, his time in the California labor movement, and why the administration’s aggressive economic and immigration policies are making things harder for everyone.
TRANSCRIPT
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Welcome to Who Cares!, a podcast by SEIU 2015. I’m Arnulfo De La Cruz, the President of SEIU 2015 and the host of Who Cares! We are the largest union of long term care workers across the country. We’re also committed to the important issues related to long term care workers and the ever important issue of care, one of the fastest growing sectors in our country.
In today’s episode, I’m honored to be joined by our friend, a tireless advocate for working people in California and a true champion for long term care workers, Congressman Jimmy Gomez. Representative Gomez represents California’s 34th Congressional District, which is based in Los Angeles. Before joining Congress, Representative Gomez served in California’s legislature. Representative Gomez comes from a labor background, the United Nurses Association of California, the Union of Healthcare Professionals and AFSCME. Welcome Representative Gomez, we’re really excited to have you join us on Who Cares!
Rep. Jimmy Gomez: Arnulfo, thank you for having me really. I appreciate it.
De La Cruz: Yes, sir. And you know, before we talk about the issues that you’re working so hard on in Washington, DC, maybe I was hoping you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. I think you grew up here in Southern California. Is that right?
Rep. Gomez: Oh, I did. I did. I was born in Orange County, but I grew up out in Riverside. I’m the youngest of six from immigrant parents. They’re from Zacatecas and Aguascalientes. Four of my siblings were born there. They came here and brought my four siblings, and my brother Javier and I were born here.
So just like a lot of immigrant families, they were dealing with everything from working–they needed to work four or five jobs to make ends meet, put a roof over our head, food on the table, that’s what they did–anything to help out their kids. And I always tell people that my experience as the son of immigrants, also of workers, really shaped who I am. The idea that the experience of not having health insurance, that was the number one issue–the experience of getting sick with pneumonia, and almost bankrupting my family because I went to the hospital. That really kind of shaped everything, how I view things: that we should work for the people who need the most help
And ever since then, that’s what I’ve been focused on, and that’s why I joined the labor movement. Worked for AFSCME, worked for United Nurses. It was all about empowerment, giving back and making sure that people will be better off, the next generation will be better off than the last one. And that’s why I ran for assembly, and why I’m in Congress, is to continue those fights.
But everything is personal: workers rights, immigrant rights, you know, making sure students have quality education. All of that is because I, you know, my family struggled like everybody else’s, and I want to make sure that people have a little bit of an easier opportunity to succeed.
De La Cruz: We really appreciate you sharing that, and I know we’re going to get to immigration in a bit. But what an incredible story, your story of struggle, of the American dream. And I can’t imagine how proud your parents and grandparents and your family is that, you know, they came here looking for a better future. You’re now a United States Congressman. That is the American dream. And I think that’s what’s best about America, kind of the immigrant story.
So we really appreciate you being able to join and like you said, you come from a labor background, representing workers, working with workers. And you know, this is a podcast about care. In particular, we represent half a million caregivers in California, the bulk of them home care, but we also represent people who work in our nursing homes and skilled care facilities across California. Is there any story in particular about care that you’d like to share? I know that you said you yourself struggle with pneumonia. I’m familiar with that because my son, two years ago in a baseball tournament in Arizona, came home with pneumonia. It was a really scary moment for the family, so I can appreciate that.
Rep. Gomez: Yeah, no. Well, I’m glad your son’s okay. And I think those experiences kind of really bring it home for people when their loved ones get sick.
You know, it’s interesting, because one of the things–most people don’t know this but–my mom, she worked multiple jobs. She worked a day job and then evening job, both five days a week and then on the weekends, right? So she was working from eight in the morning to 11 o’clock at night, and she did her morning job during the day. She was an IHSS worker. She actually went to take care of seniors in their homes, and she did that work, taking care of seniors, caring for seniors. Oftentimes, these were not relatives, right? Because it was through a private agency, and she saw kind of like their needs, right? That they needed somebody around the care, and oftentimes their family, they might have kids, but they weren’t there. They moved away.
She started off with a few families, and then it went down to this one family, and it was–their names were Lonnie and Leonard. It was a long time ago, and the husband ended up passing away, and all there was was Lonnie. So she became kind of a family member, like my dad would go over there and mow her lawn. I would go over and she would give me cookies, right? Like my mom was there. And then, you know, my parents were there when she passed away, right? Sometimes these caregivers are the only ones that are there to give people that comfort at their last moment.
So, that’s one story of caregiving, and it’s interesting–later on, when I’m joining, I joined AFSCME. I’m driving–this was in September of ‘06–my mom needed to do a doctor’s appointment in LA for something. So I went and picked her up from Riverside, drove her back to LA, and she goes, “What do you do?”
I said, I work for a union. And she goes, “You know, I used to–I was part of a union.” I’m like, “You were? Why didn’t you tell us? I had no idea.”
And then she’s, like, telling me this story. And she goes, “I’d make phone calls. I’d get active.” And I said, “What union was it?” She said it was through that job.
I said, Well, you–it’s either SEIU or AFCSME. And she goes, “It was the the union–”. She said, “I can’t remember the name, but the symbol was a white dove.” And I was, “Oh, that’s United Domestic Workers, right?” So the union she became a member of because she was doing some in-home support work was a union I would, years later, work for without ever knowing it, right, and she never talked about it. So, I always said it was something in the frijoles that she put in that made us seek out activism.
[Laughter]
But no, it really did, like–I noticed the struggles with those care workers, right? My mom, like, you know, she’d get a raise, it was like 10 cents or something–like, like, really small. And then there would always be, “How many more hours can I get? How many more hours can that person qualify?” So it was always these, like, making sure people got the support.
And another is my dad. He died of pancreatic cancer in ‘05. And I was, I just finished up a campaign. He was having issues, and I had to be like, I took time off to come to his doctor’s appointments. We didn’t know what it was, but when somebody is really sick with, like, something that is a chronic illness or something that they’re gonna pass away from, it’s just a lot of doctor’s appointments. So I basically had to take–there’s no way my mom could have helped him by herself–so I took that time.
He got diagnosed, I think, in like January, and they basically didn’t give him much time to live, and he passed away on April 1, 2005. So it’s like the caregiving, you know–people see the struggle and the weight of it, right? But when families take care of somebody for such even for a three month period of time, if you extend it over years, which some do, they’re almost suffering from emotional and not just physical wear and tear, right? It’s kind of like a PTSD that people experience, and then once their loved one passes away, they’re kind of searching for stuff there. It’s emotionally trying on them.
So, I’ve done a lot: graduated from Harvard, got elected to different offices, and I always say that, still, one of the most meaningful things that I ever did was being able to take care of my dad and be there in the remaining days. So, I think we need to be able to help people who need that help, give them the dignity, and then allow people to be able to afford to do it.
De La Cruz: Wow. What an incredible story. And I’m really sorry to hear about the passing of your father, but for the folks listening, I mean, it doesn’t get much more powerful than that. You were a caregiver of your father–what an incredible son. Your mother was a member of the union and a caregiver. So I think a lot of folks listening surely can appreciate your story and that journey.
And like we said, every family has a story of care. It’s just always interesting to see, you know what that is.
You mentioned something around the difficulty of being a caregiver. Historically, this has been considered domestic work, right? And I grew up in the Farm Workers Union, where they spent decades, when kind of Cesar Chavez was organizing, to say that this is real American work, deserving of the same living wage and benefits like other American work and domestic work in this country. For home care providers in particular, it’s not been seen as American work, and because of that, we’ve had real difficulty fighting for a living wage.
Just to give you a sense, there’s no IHSS provider in California that has a retirement plan. The average age of these women is about 55 or 60 years old. In their golden era, where they’re supposed to be able to enjoy time with their grandchildren, they’re having to, you know, work two and three jobs. And so, we’ve been really focused on lifting up standards for caregivers.
This is one of the fastest growing jobs in America. We’re an aging population, and the need for care continues to explode. So we’re like, “All right, let’s, let’s elect some good people, and let’s make sure that this issue that we think all Americans really support care.” And I always say, like, “Who would you want caring for your loved ones? Someone who’s making minimum wage with no benefits, or someone who’s able to also take care of their own family?”
So then we go to this past election, and what we’re hearing out of Washington and what we’re seeing kind of on the ground are two really concerning things, among many others: the issue of immigration and Medicaid. Medicaid is the primary funder for home care in California. It also helps to fund our skilled care facilities and nursing homes, and that at a time when we’re trying to attract the care workforce of the future, not only would they propose cutting what helps to resource care, but then they also kind of go after immigrants, right?
The President recently revoked TPS from roughly a half a million Haitians. We have a lot of Central American and other leaders with TPS that are caregivers in Los Angeles who are kind of terrified, given everything that’s been happening at the national level.
What is frustrating are the comments about, like, “Well, why can’t people just get in line?” And it’s like, you got to remind people, the last president who did anything on aligning and creating a path to citizenship was actually Ronald Reagan. From 1986 until now, there is really not a path, right? And that’s why we’ve said that we have a broken system of immigration in this country, and why we spent decades trying to address that. But you know, how would you frame, for the folks listening, the moment that we’re in around, kind of, the fight back and preserving but also expanding those critical things.
Rep. Gomez: It’s interesting. Also my mother, I mentioned, she worked two, like, almost four jobs a week. Her evening jobs and the weekend jobs were at convalescent homes. So she worked in the laundry room at a convalescent home. So I had a lot of experience going there, you know, with my dad to drop off food for her when she was working there, so I got to see that as well. And those individuals and the skilled nursing home facilities, you know, sometimes they don’t have their loved one to take care of them, right? They rely on Medicare and Medicaid and MediCal, as it’s called here, and most people don’t know that. And it’s interesting because I’ve also visited a lot of them over my time in office.
And so one of the things is: one, if you cut Medicaid, right–the Republicans are all, we want to cut $880 billion from this one particular committee, and the only real wiggle room they have is Medicaid. That’s where they’re going to do their cuts. And that impacts not only working class folks who get their basic health care through that because they’re low income, but also a lot of those patients that are in convalescent homes that don’t have their income to pay for it. It’s getting paid by Medicare and Medicaid, right? The, as what people call them, the Medi-Medis. Those are the folks that–that’s how they’re getting taken care of.
And what’s going to happen is that impacts Americans across the country, right? Oh, I’m a Republican or I’m even a Democrat who voted for Trump and a red state? Well, doesn’t matter, right? Medicaid is a national program, and it’s going to impact everybody when they do those massive cuts.
Also, oftentimes it’s those people in the convalescent homes are doing the work–the nurses, the RNs, the nurses assistants or the LVNs– are often people of color, often immigrants. People that are in the laundry room, people that are in, you know, custodial, they’re often immigrants across the board. And they’re doing the hard work to care for, you know, everybody’s loved one, not just the people in our own communities, but across the country.
So when they when people attack immigrants, when they attack folks that are working hard, they really don’t realize that these are the same people that are taking care of their loved ones when they’re in their, sometimes, their most lonely and vulnerable positions in any time of their life, and those are the ones that are caring for them, right? So it is something that I think about.
And here’s the thing, you can’t automate taking care of people. A lot of people talk about AI. Well, AI is not going to replace somebody who has to change somebody’s soiled sheets, or put in, you know, an IV, right? Or rotate them so they don’t get bed sores. You can’t automate that. You can’t use AI to get rid of that.
You know when people say, “Oh, get in line.” Well, people that got in line back in the early 2000s are now just getting eligible to get the residency now right, 25 years later. So it’s like a lot of stuff has changed in that period of time. The country has gotten bigger. So imagine if the people weren’t here doing that hard work.
And a lot of our economy is built on that. It’s, like, not just the healthcare industry. It’s in the farms, it’s the construction workers, It’s in the warehouses–you name it. The immigrant and the people of immigrant descent are in all these jobs, the jobs that you can’t outsource, you can’t automate.
And that’s the thing, is, when they attack immigrants for saying they’re a drain on the economy, well, they actually are the reason why the economy has grown when other countries are struggling. It’s the growth of and reason why our population continues to grow. It’s because of immigrants that we don’t have what they call the “demographic bubble” or “bomb” that China and other countries are dealing with, because we actually, for almost our entire history, understood that immigrants make our country better.
You know, I think people, some people, make arguments of like, stopping drugs at the border and its immigrants–well, actually 80% of all fentanyl smuggling is done by US citizens. So it’s not the immigrant that’s the mule, it’s the citizen who’s actually doing it.
So we’re gonna keep talking about just those benefits, the fact that we are better off. I know what gives me hope is that California experienced the same thing that the country will experience. We experienced that anti immigrant backlash in the 80s and 90s, right? So unfortunately, it’s gonna it’s gonna take longer for the country, because the country is at different places where California was, but we’re gonna keep fighting to make sure that people understand that, you know, a lot of our industries, a lot of our families wouldn’t be taken care of if it wasn’t for the immigrant.
De La Cruz: That’s exactly right. And it also reminds me that the history of this country is the waves of immigrants after, you know, the Italian, the Irish–they built political power after these attacks in a very similar way that we did after 187 here in California, registering people to vote, working on people’s citizenship applications. Kind of civic participation–being civically engaged. And so our North Star has always been, look: we don’t just want to defend, but in this moment, it’s really hard to be on offense and also defense at the same time. We do believe in immigration reform with the path to citizenship, and we’re always going to continue to fight for that, even though, obviously there’s a lot of division right now in this country. What do you think we can do? What can people do in this moment? Maybe some folks aren’t feeling agency. They feel like politics is not working at the national level. We have a plan, but I’m just curious, yeah, what do you think people can do in this moment? How do we take action and speak out first?
Rep. Gomez: We always assume that people have the same information that we do, right? And that’s not–in this day and age, where people are not getting their–they’re not all watching the same four channels or the same cable networks anymore. And they’re oftentimes not even on TV. We have to learn to find the people that we need to win over to our side and talk to them where they’re at. Is it on a Youtube program? Is it on a podcast? Is it on Twitter? Is it on Facebook? Is it on Instagram? Is it on YouTube, Tiktok? Wherever we got to go–we got to go everywhere, because it’s very segmented.
And then we got to tie things back, always, to the issues that people care about and make it relevant. Right now, everyone is suffering because the prices of food keep going up. Inflation keeps getting worse. This President is making decisions that will make them worse. Blanket tariffs. I always say I’m not against all tariffs, I’m against dumb tariffs. And dumb tariffs are the ones that cause prices of goods to go up that working people rely on. That’s the kind of dumb tariffs that we should be against.
And we need to talk to people where they’re at and say, “Well, how bad do you think it’s going to get when all of a sudden you don’t have people picking the food, and it’s rotting off the vine, and the supply of food, right, diminishes, and you still have the same demand?” Well, economics dictates the price will go up, right? It’s like there’s only one roll of toilet paper and there’s 50 people that want to buy it. Trust me, whoever has the most money is going to get that roll of toilet paper.
So we got to talk to people about how his decision to go after immigrants, his decision to, you know, start unnecessary trade wars, all that is going to drive the cost of their living up, and people are struggling. Like, remember, I always like, people go, “Oh, why you talk about eggs so much?” You know? Why do I talk about eggs? Because when we were poor, right, when we didn’t have a lot of money, my family survived on eggs and weenies and beans and tortillas, right? You can, you can buy that in the bulk. You can buy it in, like, cartons of it.
In the end, who do you think–who do they think works in the dairies? Like, who? Latinos, right? And even the people that were long term dairy farmers or farmers who are non-Latinos, what do they say? Their kids don’t want to do the business, right?
So this president keeps attacking, but we gotta put forward a message, talk to people where they’re at, what they’re suffering through. Which is, you know what? Connect the dots? It’s the cost of living, cost of housing, cost of health care. Gutting programs that help people is just going to make it worse, and then attacking the people that do the work is going to make it worse.
De La Cruz: Absolutely, and I do think the vast majority of Californians share those values. We have that shared history here of people understanding the contribution of immigrants and how it helps to power so much of our industries, culture, everything right? And so I do think we’re continuing to work at the national level.
And I just want to let folks listening know–if you do want to share your opinion, lift up your voice and communicate with your Congressperson to let them know how important Medicaid or MediCal is to you and your family, why it’s important that we help to recognize the contributions of immigrants. You can actually call 1-800-719-0332 and you’ll be able to be connected to your member of Congress just by putting in your zip code. I’ve called this number: it works. Again, that’s 800-719-0332.
Congressman, we really want to appreciate you joining us for this really, really important conversation, and I want to thank everyone listening to another episode of Who Cares today. We had an incredible conversation with our congressman, Jimmy Gomez, about a wide range of topics, including immigration.
And as I’ve said before, 2015 and SEIU as a whole, we remain committed to fighting for Immigrant Justice. Please reach out to your union if you need resources and immigration issues for yourself, your family, your care recipients, or those in your community, as you heard from representative Gomez, we need to elevate our voices now more than ever.
If you have not done so: again, you can call your congressional representative at 1-800-719-0332. When you call, tell your member of Congress why you need them to keep their hands off slashing Medicaid in particular, given we know that that conversation is going to continue in Washington.
Congressman, anything you’d like to leave the folks with before we drop off?
Rep. Gomez: There’s an old saying, “Ten people who speak make more noise than the 10,000 who remain silent.” And I know SEIU has millions of people who can speak, and if we do, we will change the country once again. So keep up the good work. You have a friend in my office and and and a champion, and somebody who’s gonna fight for you every single day. So thank you so much for having me.
De La Cruz: Really appreciate you, Congressman. Yes, we can–si se puede! This is another podcast of Who Cares!, thank you all for dialing in, and we’ll be in touch real soon.