Humanitarian Crisis at the Border Moves Close to Home

In states like Texas and Florida, migrants are being used as political pawns as they are bussed to the states of their political opponents.

According to Todd Feurer and Sabrina Franza in the CBS article “Chicago City Council approves $70 million more in migrant funding,” “Chicago will dedicate an additional $70 million to its efforts to house, feed, and provide other services to thousands of asylum seekers after the City Council on Friday approved Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request for more funds for the city’s migrant crisis.”

States like New York, California, and Illinois are receiving these migrants without any prior notice and are forced to construct makeshift shelters in schools and other places now closed to the public due to the humanitarian crisis.

According to Emily Navarro, a sociology professor at Elmhurst University, “Migrants are an incredibly important part of our country, both as part of our cultural fabric and also as a base of our economy. It would be wise to consider how to best support their integration into communities, particularly through providing legal means to obtain work.”

In Chicago, more than 35,000 migrants (about twice the seating capacity of Madison Square Garden) have been bussed mainly from Texas. In Elmhurst, there have been 49 buses that arrived at the Metra station, containing 2,081 migrants in total.

According to the same article in CBS, “Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), who chairs the council’s Immigrant and Refugee Rights Committee, dismissed Beale’s suggestion that halting funding for migrants in Chicago would halt the flow of migrants into Chicago, arguing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is sending migrants to Chicago in an effort to sow division ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August.”

The buses to Elmhurst started arriving on Dec. 14 from the state of Texas. These arrivals began because the City of Chicago put its own rules and regulations on the buses, including requiring them to announce when they were arriving, setting a limit of buses per hour, and setting a time limit to when they could arrive.

According to Navarro, “Because of this, the needs of this migration community are much higher. They are also more visible—which is by design in this particular case. Although I cannot speak to resident opinion per se, I do think the visibility and high needs create a greater sense of urgency to deal with the problem.”

According to the same CBS article, “In seeking the additional funding, the Johnson administration has warned that without it, the city could again see migrants ending up sleeping on the floors of police stations, inside Chicago Park District fieldhouses, or on the city’s streets. The mayor’s aides also have warned that turning down the funding could strain the city’s relationships with the county, state, and federal officials they have asked to help with the crisis.”

Back at the border, the situation is not any better. In Texas, they are putting physical barriers on land and in water despite the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security asking them not to.

In Texas and Arizona, migrant camps are overcrowded and exposed to the elements, making for a dirty environment, and uncomfortable living situations. In some cases, people are separated from their families and left with no information about the whereabouts of their loved ones for days or weeks on end.

The U.S. Senate introduced a bill that would work to restrict immigration and increase border enforcement, however, was not able to pass it. This bill was ridiculed by former President Donald Trump and many republicans in the House of Representatives as weak on immigration and not strong enough to solve the problem. Included in this bill was funding for wars in countries like Ukraine and Russia.

The Presidential candidates visited the southern border and held press conferences with differing views on the crisis. While they didn’t visit any of the migrants in the camps, they each brought in different ideas on how to solve the crisis.

“Constituents want to see that the candidates are taking migration seriously, so I do think a visit to the border would be beneficial,” Navarro said. “However, constituent’s beliefs about what should happen at the border differ greatly, and in some ways, Biden is dealing with more nuanced beliefs in terms of the tension between border security and the humanitarian needs of migrants.”