This is a very, very BAD idea.
How 'bout just stopping the criminal invasion?
How 'bout severe penalties for companies that employ criminal aliens. Say 5 years in the pen and a $100,000 fine.
I expect these "jobs" the criminal aliens have, you know, the jobs legal residents won't do, would dry up very quickly if the employers were sufficiently afraid of hiring a criminal alien.
And one the jobs dry up the criminal aliens will most likely go home.
Actually, this is an improvement. Congress long ago passed EMTALA which says that anyone showing up at an emergency room must be treated. It never did bother to say who was going to pay for this little mandate. The result has been an increasing tendency for people who don't want to pay to use ERs as the 7-11 of health care convenience. Even to the extent that they give fake names and IDs.
The federal government said it would pay by giving disproportionate share payments (aka pork) to states. They were theoretically supposed to pay for the care EMTALA required but the money doesn't necessarily go to the places that actually get stuck with the bill. A little suburban hospital in my city had an illegal construction worker dumped in their ER after he fell three stories. He was paralyzed and they had to absorb the half a million his treatment cost. Since they don't see a lot of Medicaid patients they didn't get a dime from the state DSH fund.
As a result, hospitals in areas with lots of illegals (Los Angeles, Texas, Arizona)have been going bankrupt. This is a stopgap measure to make sure that they people that deliver the care the Feds require at least get paid for it. The other good thing is that it will give us an idea of what it is really costing. Currently costs are buryied in individual hospital profit and loss statements.
The next problem is how to pay the docs that staff the ERs. When they treat a free care patient the hospitals make them eat it. As a result they are not willing to staff ERs...
As with so many other problems in health care, the root cause is forcing people to give their services away without expecting payment.