H.S. spent her early days in New York living on the streets with her three-year-old son, sleeping in parks and on sidewalks, and going entire days without food.
“My children were hungry,” H.S. said, which is why she fled Cuautla, Mexico, for the city in 1990. She wanted to escape the extreme poverty she was living in and thought New York was the place to do it. H.S. requested the use of her initials because of her lack of legal immigration status.
After learning about the city’s food pantries, she queued up every day for three hours at 4 a.m. to make sure they had something to eat. “I felt bad, thinking that I had just brought my son to suffer.” Her other two children were staying with relatives.
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Today, at 65, affected by rheumatoid arthritis, H.S. cannot do the odd jobs she used to — handing out flyers for small businesses or selling fruit on the street. She cooks for her brother, with whom she lives in Manhattan. He gives her $50 for her weekly expenses.
“The people who come here to work [in the United States] suffer a lot,” H.S. said in Spanish. She was once brutally beaten by a disturbed man while distributing flyers. No passerby intervened, she said, and the aggressor was not charged with any crimes.
Without any financial support from the United States government, she’s asking Mexico for help. “I ask [Mexico’s] President Claudia Sheinbaum for support,” she said. “Here they just tell us we are useless.”
The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) is trying to pressure Mexico’s federal government to extend the universal pension it provides to citizens aged 65 and over to Mexicans in the United States, prioritizing those living without legal authorization. NDLON says that about 89,000 Mexican citizens living in the U.S. would qualify, based on U.S. Census Bureau data.
Called “Pensión para el Bienestar de las Personas Adultas Mayores” – which translates roughly to pension for the well being of older people – the pension is a modest amount: 6,400 pesos (or $358) every two months. But for people like H.S., that could go a long way. Currently, only Mexicans within the territorial border have access to these pensions.
“Migrants benefit their communities of origin,” said María de Lourdes Rosas López, researcher at the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, and co-author of the NDLON report. “Mexico has a social debt with these people.”
Advocates say most older Mexican-born immigrants without regular immigration status have precarious employment situations, trying to find jobs every day in the informal economy without guarantees of continuity, in sectors like construction, gardening, landscaping, domestic work, and other services.
The average monthly income of these senior Mexicans is $1,314, according to a still-unpublished report by NDLON based on a nationwide survey of 660 individuals. That is just below the federal poverty line for 2026.
These workers are not eligible for social security, Medicare, food assistance, or supplemental income, despite having worked in the United States for 30 years on average, often under conditions of extreme exploitation, according to advocates. Most of them, though, have paid taxes and contributed to social security.
H.S. receives free healthcare access through NYU Langone Health, but no public benefits. She can consider herself lucky. Only three states allow public health care access to all immigrants regardless of their immigration status: New York, Illinois, and California. These states are home to about 40% of all Mexico-born day laborers, according to the Pew Research Center.
These immigrants are excluded from receiving public entitlements even though their contributions reduced the U.S. deficits by nearly a third over the past three decades, according to a Cato Institute analysis from February. In 2022 alone, workers without a legal immigration status paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded.
It seems unlikely the U.S. would revisit extending these benefits any time soon, since the Trump administration has instead further criminalized immigrants, claiming that they are “poisoning the blood of the country” and are “some of the worst people on earth.”
Meanwhile, of the people surveyed by NDLON, 70% of the older Mexican day laborers feel that their situation worsened during 2025.
“One lives in constant anxiety, especially those of us who have children here,” H.S. said. She’s worried about a potential arrest by immigration agents because she knows it can be fatal — at least nine people have been killed during detainment and 43 immigrants have died in detention since January 2025.
“You start thinking,” she said, “where are they going to throw my child if they arrest him? Where are they going to lock me in?”
Social debt to migrants
R.G., who asked to be identified by his initials because of his immigration status, traveled from Puebla, Mexico, to New York as a tourist in 1998 and overstayed his visa. “I thought it would be easy,” R.G., 65, said about life in the United States.
In New York, R.G. worked mostly in restaurants. His 13-year-old son, who had just finished primary school in Mexico, joined him in the United States to also work in a restaurant’s kitchen. The boy never went back to school.
His son, now 41, still toils in a kitchen, although he is “a chef,” R.G. said in Spanish, “making good money and speaking good English.” R.G. retired from food service years ago.
R.G. makes his living now by performing boleros and Mexican romantic songs from the 1970s in bars and parties across New York and as a photographer at weddings. He has no pension and pays for his own health care expenses.
Luckily, R.G. said, he hasn’t faced any serious health issues. But he’s wary about the future. “The time is going to come when I just don’t have the strength left to work, and the rent here certainly doesn’t wait for anyone.”
R.G.’s lament about housing prices is shared by other older immigrants. Almost 15% of the older Mexican day laborers NDLON surveyed are unhoused — forced to sleep on the streets, in shelters, or in cars, warehouses, or churches. Almost one in five (17%) report having no income at all, while that same percentage live alone. Still, 58% send money to Mexico.
Remittances – money earned in the U.S. used to support family back home – is another factor that advocates for extending pensions point to. Remittances sent by Mexicans migrants — totaling $61.8 billion in 2025, according to Mexico’s central bank — are indeed vital to the country’s economy. According to BBVA Research, 1.1 million people have been lifted out of multidimensional poverty — which considers factors beyond just low income, including access to health, education, electricity, water, and sanitation — thanks to these transfers..
“Migrants living in the US have kept a key part of the social contract with Mexico by sending remittances to their families over the years,” said Robert Courtney Smith, professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), an expert on transnationalism. “They have not only reduced social pressures on the state by migrating, they also have boosted the state’s capacity by sending remittances home to keep their local communities going.”
NDLON is urging Mexico’s federal government to implement an initial pilot program that would prioritize Mexican women without a regular immigration status in the United States to receive the universal pension provided to older citizens in Mexico, according to Joel Paredes, the other co-author of the report and the organization’s representative in Mexico.
“Many women are sick, suffering from chronic conditions — diabetes, for example — or injuries to their legs and arms caused by working grueling shifts of 12 or 14 hours,” Rosas López said, adding mental health issues are also prevalent. Often, these women also care for their children, grandchildren and sick relatives.
President Claudia Sheinbaum’s office has been receptive to the demand to extend the pensions, Paredes said, especially for women, which would amount to $90 million per month for about 48,000 women. Congress would not need to change any laws, he added. “The decision depends now on the presidency.”
The pension — about $180 per month — would have “an enormous symbolic impact” considering the current political climate in the United States, the report stated.
Smith takes the idea of supporting older Mexican immigrants a step farther. He acknowledged that there will be resistance from either Mexico or the U.S. to provide pensions for this group.”Some in Mexico will say that the duty for taking care of retired undocumented workers lies in the United States, because they have been working there; some in the United States will say it lies with Mexico, because they were not working here legally,” said Smith. These dismissals, however, don’t consider the underlying contributions and duties thereby generated by the two countries, he added.
The United States “also has a social contract duty here to help take care of these migrants,” he said. Therefore in his view, the best solution would be shared by the two countries.
