To some asylum seekers, Chicago is Michael Jordan and Al Capone. To everyone else, they never heard of Chicago. Nearly 35 thousand men, women, and children loaded onto buses laden with false hopes of jobs and homes, only to find Chicago to be a city of extremes. Temperatures can get as high as 100+ degrees Fahrenheit and down to -20. So can the attitudes, boiling to the point of angry people shouting, “Go back home!” while well intentioned communities come together to feed, clothe, and care for the new arrivals. Chicago preports to be a welcoming city, though the welcoming mat may seem hard to find. To migrants sleeping on the floors in local police stations, Chicago would not be considered welcoming.
Nowhere to shower. Nowhere for women to have the privacy to discreetly attend to their needs. Hushing their children, as not to anger their hosts, the Chicago Police Department. In fact, the police uniforms resemble the cruelty that many endured in the countries they passed through.
Now, nearly all of the migrants are living in shelters, large rooms with rows and rows of cots. Below their cots lie all of their worldly possessions, subject to theft by staff or desperate fellow residents, if there is anything worth stealing at all. The buildings are often dirty and cold with overflowing bathrooms.
Inscribed on a plaque in New York reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” What happened?
As of February 1st, nearly 35 thousand people have been taken to this northern city. Currently we have 15,000 men, women, and children living in shelters. Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson was thwarted when he attempted to implement a tent city akin to 1940’s internment camps that Americans still carry the shame that were constructed to those who were born in countries that had declared war on America.
The mayor of Chicago also, taking a page from New York’s mayor, decided to give eviction notices to the families at the shelters after 60 days.
Nearly 1,000 of them were lucky enough to arrive before July 31st 2023, the date that president Biden decided was the cut off for the T.P.S. (Temporary Protection Status) program. This reprieve allows families to legally work while their cases get adjudicated.
Everyone else that came after the July deadline needs to wait 150 days, after they apply for asylum. People do not even know that they did not apply for asylum yet. The legal implications for immigration in the United States is byzantine. You can have someone help translate the forms, but cannot do anything further than translation, unless they are an attorney, but if they had money enough to hire an attorney, they would have never left in the first place.
Many of the families that have arrived are not much older than children themselves. It is disheartening to see young people navigating the U.S. legal system without guidance as it could jeopardize their asylum case if someone helped beyond translation services.
The next group are the ones who came after July 31st, but before November 17th. There are nearly 7,000 people that fit in this category. They are eligible for 60 days of housing assistance while they are in the shelter for 60 days. Anyone who came afterwards, which is over 7,000 families, are not eligible for housing assistance and are required to leave the shelter after 60 days.
“Chicago ain’t ready for reform yet!”
The quote from Chicago saloonkeeper and alderman Paddy Bauler is as true now, as it was nearly 100 years ago. Chicago, living up to its reputation of political corruption, awarded the catering contract to a company that has only been in business for three months and has a reputation of abusing union workers picketing their restaurant as it was being built because they were not using union contractors. Now this might seem frivolous, but this restaurant and its property was paid for by taxpayers. I know you must be asking yourself, why would taxpayers pay for a restaurant, but this was paid with T.I.F. dollars—Dollars set aside by the city for aldermanic prerogative and pet projects to those who curry favor with former mayors. Did I mention Chicago was corrupt?
“…we are emigrants, not prisoners.”
Recently, I was greeted with a message from one of the asylum seekers, “Good morning. Sorry to bother you. I want to ask you a question to see if you can help us here at the shelter. A new administration was hired and from that moment on everything worked worse… who can we talk to because the food and the treatment they are giving us is worse than the one they give to prisoners, and we are emigrants, not prisoners.”
We can hang our heads and just take this treatment as what another wave of immigrants are treated here in Chicago. But wait, Chicago has received more Ukrainian refugees than families from Venezuela. We do not see on the news of the mistreatment and shelters for Ukrainians. We do not see Ukrainians being taken advantage of and being used as political pawns. Our Ukrainians brothers and sisters have certainly suffered at the hands of a Russian invasion. So why the difference in treatment?
Some have argued that there has been a Ukrainian community here in Chicago that was able to absorb the Ukrainian refugees, while Chicago never had a Venezuelan community. The Russians caused the Ukrainian refugee crisis, but the U.S. foreign policies created the Venezuelan refugee crisis. Americans are blind and ignorant to our brothers and sisters in the western hemisphere that a “trusted news source” referred to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala as three Mexican countries when discussing Trump cutting aid due to the flow of migrants across the U.S. border with Mexico. Be it racism. Be it ignorance, we have over 30,000 new Chicagoans, and they are here as our new neighbors!
Now, Chicago has a golden opportunity to embrace the next wave of immigrants. To have them sew their own patch in the quilt. Pilsen, named for a bohemian town in Europe, is now the epicenter of the Mexicans here in Chicago, so what will our newly arrived Venezuelan brothers and sisters legacy be?
They will be Chicagoans but only if our leaders, and we, treat them with the dignity they deserve. Anything less should be brought to light, after all, during his inauguration Johnson promised to provide for the homeless and asylum seekers. Kicking them out to our brutal streets is NOT the answer. The answer is for us to live by that promise to welcome the huddled masses with open arms. To give them shelter and food and a real opportunity to reach the American Dream. This is the “Soul of Chicago”. This is a welcoming city. Let’s make it happen.
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