Every morning in New Bedford, MA, seafood workers clock in before dawn to plants that line the waterfront, donning gloves and plastic gowns over double layers of sweaters to keep out the icy chill. Men heave crates of scallops, cod, flounder and haddock. Women stand at the lines, skilled hands wielding sharp knives and small tweezers to clean fillets, hour after hour, removing every spine, sorting and sizing scallops, not letting an off-color one get by.

In April of 2020, with the virus spreading and restaurants shutting everywhere, seafood plants closed down, sometimes for weeks. Unauthorized workers, who are not eligible for unemployment insurance, quickly exhausted their funds. They lined up at food banks, going for days on cereal and sandwiches, and fell behind on rent.

Cash-strapped families doubled and tripled up in ramshackle wood-frame apartment houses that have sheltered generations of immigrants working in the fisheries. The overcrowding intensified as schoolchildren were stuck at home all day with online learning.

As soon as the plants reopened, immigrant fish workers went back to their jobs.

Even with the city’s economy recovering, many immigrant families are still struggling with bare subsistence in New Bedford. Prospects for these workers, who have proved to be a vital and resilient labor force for its seafood industry during the crisis, are closely tied to President Biden’s sweeping $2 trillion social policy bill, now under debate in the Senate. Because many of the immigrants are undocumented, they were excluded from most federal COVID-19 relief.

Immigrants were left out of thousands of dollars of vital payments, even though they were working in an essential food industry and paying taxes. Their exclusion meant that aid did not reach an especially vulnerable group of Americans: their children, most of whom are citizens because they were born in the United States.

The vast bill that passed the House of Representatives on Nov. 19, 2021 includes $700 billion in assistance for working families, including nearly $200 billion in direct payments through tax credits. Biden said one of his goals is to cut child poverty by half.

Whether he reaches that target could depend on places like New Bedford, which city officials say is the biggest commercial fishing port in the United States and the scallop capital of the world. If Congress passes the plan without expanding access for immigrants, scholars say, as many as 4.9 million mixed-status families — those that include undocumented parents and their U.S. citizen children — could be excluded from support again.

Read the full article about poverty in immigrant communities by Julia Preston and Ariel Goodman at The Marshall Project.