Chicago:
What Do Migrants Actually Get?

Jan 29, 2024

Alderman Anthony Beale, representative of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, attacked Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to spend some COVID relief money on migrants. He said: "We’re playing a shell game with millions of dollars while the people of Chicago are hurting. COVID relief money was supposed to go toward relief for the people of Chicago, not migrants…."

Beale’s ward includes neighborhoods where almost half of the population lives below the poverty line, neighborhood schools have been closed, and health services are underfunded. Other areas are just as bad—in 2021, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless estimated that almost 70,000 people in Chicago experienced homelessness.

Since then, about 35,000 migrants have arrived in the city, and they are getting some city services, even though long term residents aren’t getting nearly what they need. This has allowed politicians to play an ugly game, blaming the new arrivals for the poverty and lack of services facing long term residents.

But what are these migrants really getting?

More than 14,000 people are crammed into 28 city shelters. These lack sufficient bathrooms and some have no showers—migrants have to bus to another facility for that. Disease has been reported spreading through some of these shelters, and at least one young boy already died.

The city only allocated enough money to fund the current woefully inadequate shelter system through April, and it threatens to start kicking out people who have been in shelters more than 60 days. Chicago has not set up new shelters since November, even though busloads of migrants continue to arrive, forcing more overcrowding and pushing more people onto the streets, or to sleep in city buses or at the airports.

Migrants were promised work permits by the Biden administration. But hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants are already in Chicago without work permits, many having arrived 30 years ago or more—some ask why these new arrivals should get something they have wanted for decades? Well in reality, 70% of the migrants aren’t even eligible for these promised permits, and only 284, or less than 1%, had actually gotten them as of January.

So, while Beale is right that Chicagoans are hurting, it’s not because the migrants are getting so much. The migrants begging with their families in front of the grocery stores and Walgreens obviously don’t have it. The capitalists do! They’re the only ones who benefit when working class people fight over the few scraps they drop from their overfull table.