The migrant crisis in Chicago: A test case

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration rolled into its eighth month in office following a series of high-profile faceplants that led even some of his most ardent supporters wondering what had happened. The most prominent of these stemmed from the city’s attempts to house and to provide other services to the more than 20,000 migrant asylum seekers who have arrived in Chicago since 2021.

Chicago represents a test case for how a “sanctuary” city can welcome an influx of migrants, when as many as 2.4 million asylum seekers have crossed the southern border in the last year. Hundreds of migrants arrive weekly on buses dispatched by the right-wing governors of Texas and Florida.

The tactic of right-wing governments chartering buses to export migrants to “liberal” cities has its origin in the “reverse freedom rides” that southern white supremacists orchestrated in the early 1960s. A brainchild of the White Citizens’ Councils, the reverse freedom rides bought bus tickets to northern cities for poor Black workers. The idea was to show that “the north” was hypocritical in its criticism of segregation in the south, and that the liberal north wasn’t any more welcoming to Black migrants than south was. As South Side Weekly’s Jesús Flores wrote,

While there were efforts to assist [reverse] freedom riders in Chicago and other cities, they were arriving at urban centers that already had inadequate social safety nets for their existing Black residents. In cities receiving riders, various organizations, including the local NAACP chapters, religious leaders, and the Urban League, attempted to help the reverse freedom riders. But as Lloyd General reported for the Chicago Defender, “The victimized migrants reached their destinations to find that all were in sympathy with them, but they could find no jobs.”

Cities were forced to admit that they did not have the capabilities to meet the needs of new migrants, as they were barely meeting the needs of their existing Black populations.

The “reverse freedom rides” ultimately collapsed in the face of civil rights organizing and the decision of business and government leaders to junk segregation. But they left an example for the likes of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to take up. And, so far, the stunt has shown how ill-equipped are “blue state” local governments and their tattered safety nets to address migrants’ needs.

As the numbers of migrants to Chicago increased over the last year, the city—under two consecutive administrations—has appeared remarkably feckless. For months, it has assigned migrants, including whole families, to stay in city shelters, police stations and airports. It has relied on committed volunteers to help migrants with food, clothes, and assistance. It has spent more than $300 million, but with much of that money going to private contractors that haven’t really filled the gap a downsized state safety net has left. In fact, as a Block Club Chicago investigation showed, private contractors select, own, and manage the “city shelters”. The city pays a higher rent to these owners than they could earn renting their space to commercial customers.

While the city has struggled to welcome about 24,000 mostly Latin American migrants, it has managed to welcome and to integrate, with hardly any public fanfare or controversy, about 29,000 refugees from Ukraine’s war with Russia. To understand why, we must consider U.S. immigration policy in light of U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. immigration system is a patchwork of laws and programs that ultimately serves the goals of U.S. economic and foreign policy. And the U.S. and Western European foreign policy establishments have lined up behind Ukraine for reasons having more to do with inflicting a blow on their Russian rival than on supporting Ukraine’s right to choose its own destiny. One of the by-products of that support is the U.S. government’s support for Ukrainians to migrate to the U.S. and to other countries.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration invoked Title 42 of a 1944 public health act that barred immigration to the U.S. on “public health” grounds. Before the Biden administration fully lifted the Title 42 ban earlier this year, it made an exception for Ukrainians following Russia’s invasion of their country in 2022. Under the exception, Ukrainians were allowed to migrate to the U.S.—for a year before the administration lifted the ban for all migrants.

As Avril Benoît, executive director of Doctors Without Borders-USA, pointed out: “Exemptions to Title 42 for Ukrainians show that the US government is perfectly capable of processing people efficiently and with dignity when it dedicates the resources and when there is political will to do so,” said Avril Benoît, executive director of MSF-USA. “People should be allowed to seek asylum based on their need for protection and not based on their nationality, origin, race, or ethnicity—in accordance with US domestic and international law….”

Following the Russian invasion, the Biden administration also announced a “Uniting for Ukraine” program offering temporary residency, a Social Security card and immediate work authorization for those who come to the U.S. Pavlo Bandriwsky, vice president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America’s Illinois chapter, told Axios: “The Uniting for Ukraine program is being looked [by the feds] at as a model for future immigration to the U.S. . . . Because it provides certain support and responsibility, so people aren’t just thrown into tents and told, ‘Fend for yourself’”.

In other words, if the federal, state, and local governments wanted to devise a solution to the current migrant crisis, it’s not impossible to do. But providing a safe and secure future for non-Ukrainian migrants arriving at the southern border doesn’t fit with the geopolitical aims of U.S. foreign policy. In fact, much of the migrant flow—for example, from Venezuela—is a direct outcome of U.S. policy. In Venezuela, the U.S. has maintained economic sanctions against the Maduro government for years.

In the current political era of mass migration due to poverty, climate change and war, the political impacts on “receiving” countries have generally been to polarize politics to the right, and far right. The substantial victory of the far right Freedom Party in the Netherlands is only the most recent example.

In the U.S., anti-immigration politics have been the animating force of the most committed elements of the Republican Party and the far-right organizations that hover around it. Anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim hate boosted Donald Trump to the top of the GOP field in 2016—a position he hasn’t relinquished since. He is already on record pledging, if making it to the White House next year, to herd undocumented immigrants into camps before implementing mass deportations.

The mini-Trumps like Abbott and DeSantis have already shown us where they stand. Whether their anti-immigrant stunts were just trolling or had some longer-term strategy in mind is immaterial at this point. What they have been able to accomplish is an increase in right-wing anti-immigration politics in “blue” America.

This has emanated in the first place from politicians like the right-wing Democratic Mayor of New York, Eric Adams. In Chicago, many of the anti-migrant ringleaders have been the right-wing elements of the Democratic Party who backed Paul Vallas against Brandon Johnson in the mayor’s race earlier this year.

But we can’t ignore that this has also struck a chord among everyday people, and even among so-called progressive leaders. It has exposed the fraying of the social safety net in these cities, leading people to ask why migrants should get support when there are so many homeless people. Or why community centers and other resources in Black and Brown neighborhoods should be dedicated to migrants when they have been neglected in these communities for years. Advocates who have fought for decades for immigrants to gain authorization to work legally voice frustration that they have been overlooked in the current focus on migrants.

In “progressive” Chicago, this has stoked a kind of zero-sum politics where one group’s gain is seen as another’s loss: Black v. Brown, new arrival vs established immigrant, even state vs city. As the migrant buses arrived in the city over the last year, there has been an outpouring of support for migrants from mutual aid groups and volunteers. But it’s clear that volunteers and donations can’t address the crisis, and it has exposed how unprepared the city and state is.

The administration has tried to sideline the issue through bureaucratic maneuvering. But it hasn’t worked.

In November, the mayor and his allies tried to shut down debate on a resolution that some right-wing alders had proposed for a referendum on Chicago’s almost 40-year status as a sanctuary city. This led to a fracas between leaders of the council’s Black caucus and the mayor’s allies in which the Black caucus accused the mayor’s floor leader, Democratic Socialists of America member, Carlos Ramirez Rosa of physically accosting the elder member of the Black caucus, Emma Mitts (a conservative, who supported Vallas in the mayor’s race). In the controversy that followed, Johnson forced Rosa’s resignation as floor leader and chair of the Zoning Committee.

Subsequent news footage of the confrontation put many of the charges against Rosa under question. But what wasn’t under question was the city council’s “left” attempting to derail a debate rather than to take it head-on, with a pro-immigrant, pro-solidarity message. The city council’s “right” may have manipulated the situation to score some points against the “left,” but they succeeded. It doesn’t say much of the “left’s” political acumen.

But right-wing trickery couldn’t explain Johnson’s next moves. They were all on him.

In September, he announced a plan to build a “winterized base camp” on an abandoned industrial site in the city’s mostly Latino Brighton Park neighborhood. Moreover, without announcing it, the city went ahead and signed a $29 million contract with the military contractor GardaWorld, to build it. Activists for environmental justice and immigrant rights—many of whom had worked for Johnson’s election—opposed the plan. They asked why the city would make a backroom deal with GardaWorld without even attempting to spend money to rehab empty buildings that both the homeless and migrants could use.

When a city-contracted environmental assessment found toxic heavy metals on the site, the city plowed ahead anyway. The site was under construction when Illinois Gov. Pritzker pulled the plug on funding for it in December. Pritzker’s decision vindicated what environmental justice advocates had said about the site, but even right-wing politicians like Ald. Ray López could crow about how “astonishing” it was that Johnson and his advisers ever thought this was a good idea.

Johnson’s administration is now scrambling to find a plan B after it had already announced a 60-day limit on migrant stays in city shelters. Meanwhile, the migrant crisis will not go away, as the likes of Abbott and DeSantis will want to feed the right-wing narrative of Chicago as an “out of control” city in the leadup to the Democratic convention. Pritzker, who has higher aspirations, won’t go out of his way to help Johnson either.

“Help” may come from Washington—but not the type of help that improves the lives of migrants or working people. To win its multi-billion-dollar military aid package for Ukraine and Israel, the Biden administration is reportedly offering Republicans multiple policy changes to increase border repression and to restrict asylum seekers’ rights. According to insiders, linking the foreign aid package to border policy was the Biden administration’s idea! “It’s a total miscalculation of historic proportions,” an immigrant rights advocate told The Hill. “To somehow think that you can one-up Trump by legislating his agenda before he can like that’s a win is nonsensical.”