The flow of migrants into Chicago is a crisis and an opportunity
The entranceway of Chicago’s 19th district police station, just a couple of blocks east of Wrigley Field, the city’s pre-eminent baseball stadium, is no place to live. Yet enter it, and it is clear that people are managing it. Suitcases and bags of clothes are pushed up against the windows; mattresses and sleeping mats cover most of the available space. Small children run around, while adults watch soap operas on their phones. Amid it all, two police officers standing behind the desk try to listen to a woman who has come in to report some criminal behaviour. For the past few months, as many as 90 people have slept in this police station each night. When your correspondent visited, almost all there were Venezuelan migrants who had arrived in Chicago on buses as little as a day or two before.
In the past few months, police stations have become the most visible evidence of how the wave of asylum seekers arriving in Chicago are stretching the city. Since August last year, when the first busload sent by the state of Texas arrived in the Windy City, over 15,000 people have turned up. By September 22nd, roughly 10,500 people were in city accommodation, up from 7,600 less than a month before. Of those, around 1,500 were living on the floors of police stations, with another 500 or so on floors at O’Hare airport (the rest are mostly in shelters or hotels). Only New York City is hosting more. The flood of new arrivals is the first major crisis that Brandon Johnson, the city’s leftist mayor who took office in May, has to deal with. It is already showing what happens when progressive ideals crash into fiscal realities.
Chicago’s misfortune began over a year ago when Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, began taking newly arrived migrants in border towns and loading them onto buses to be transported to “sanctuary cities”, almost all in Democrat-run states in the north far from the border. Since April…
2023-09-28 09:10:08
Article from www.economist.com
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