Illustration / Juan Carlos Silva
An activist in the movement to defend immigrants recently shared how their struggle echoes that of his own family.
My parents are from the breathtakingly beautiful Westcoast of Ireland, with its rugged coast and crags of lichen-covered rocks. Yet, as my Irish-born father would say, you cannot eat the scenery. Like so many others, his heart never left his homeland, but their stomachs needed to find greener pastures.
The reasons always return to money. Money to feed your family. Money to educate your children. Money to help pay medical doctors. What we are given are scraps from the captains of industry’s table and we are told that we should be happy with whatever they deem appropriate.
Between August 2022 and May 2024, more than 41,000 men, women and children, carrying false hopes of finding jobs and homes, have been bused from Texas to Chicago as pawns in a political game being played by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. They were dropped into a city of extremes, where winter temperatures can plunge to 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and in summer soar to more than 100 degrees. Extreme positions of residents toward the migrants have also boiled over, with some angry people shouting, “Go back home!” while other well-intentioned communities come together to feed, clothe, and care for the new arrivals.
Today’s migrants were corralled into already overcrowded shelters after leaving the Chicago Police Department floors that were “home” for the past year. Such wanton disregard for our class brothers and sisters played out last August in the sad short life of three-year-old Jismary Alejandra Barboza González. She arrived dead from consuming untreated water in her family’s desperate journey, despite the Texas’s health department’s claims of providing health screenings when the family surrendered to authorities here in the United States.
In Chicago, nearly 1,000 asylum seekers were lucky enough to arrive before July 31, 2023. That was the arbitrary cutoff date of the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) program, which had allowed migrant families to work legally while their cases were being adjudicated.
More than 7,000 less fortunate people who arrived after July 31 but before November 17, 2023 were eligible for only for 60 days of housing assistance. More than 33,000 other migrant families who arrived since November 17 are not eligible for housing assistance and must leave the shelters after 60 days. The number of evictions from the shelters is nearly 3,000 and is rising every day.
This phenomenon is not unique to Chicago or to the United States. It is global. The shores of Europe are a gruesome scene of bodies of African and Asian children – such as three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy Aylan Kurdi – who did not even survive their harrowing journey over land and sea. Meanwhile, Britian’s Conservative government has passed the Safety of Rwanda bill which puts asylum seekers on a one-way flight from Britain to that central African nation. This has caused chaos on the border between Northern Ireland, which is bound by the rules of the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, which is not.
Lighthouse Reports uncovered the European Union paying hundreds of millions of euros to North African countries for the “migrant management” dumping of tens of thousands of Black people in the desert or in remote areas to keep them from entering the EU. Last August, Human Rights Watch reported that between March 2022 and June 2023, Saudi guards at the border with Yemen killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers. In September, dozens of people were injured – some of them by gunfire – during clashes between Eritrean asylum seekers and Israeli police in Tel Aviv. These are the victims of our capitalist system, based on wealth not worth.
‘WE ARE EMIGRANTS, NOT PRISONERS’
Recently, a volunteer here in Chicago, was greeted with a message from one of the asylum seekers. It said: “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.”
What changes are needed to live up to the morality promised by America? As we have witnessed, anyone who seeks to enter the United States and its world’s largest capitalist economy will do so regardless of any border patrols, fences or walls. By throwing up barriers, we are only putting these desperate families in peril. The closed border is preventing any person with a pending or a nonexistent immigration status from leaving the United States.
When families arrive in the United States, they want to start contributing to our economy and help their families back home. Let’s fast-track work permits for all undocumented persons and asylum seekers. Our country is looking for young workers and they are arriving at our doorstep every day. Yet we treat them like criminals and not like manna from heaven contributing to our economy through taxes and social security.
Like it or not, the asylum seekers are Chicagoans and Americans who deserve dignified conditions of life. Chicago calls itself a welcoming city, and Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke of the “Soul of Chicago” at his 2023 inauguration, promising to provide for the homeless and asylum seekers. Evicting or deporting families is not the answer to their suffering. The answer is inscribed on a bronze plaque in New York’s harbor with a quote from the Mother of Exiles – the Statue of Liberty. It promises to welcome the “huddled masses” with open arms here in Chicago and the United States. To give them shelter, food and a real opportunity to reach the American Dream: That is the true “Soul of Chicago” and the soul of America.
The immigrant stories of the 21st century are the stories of refugees fleeing the effects of capitalism, leaving their beloved country not as tourists or as fortune seekers, but for survival. The inequality in wealth distribution is so severely skewed today – as if we are reliving the times of a Charles Dickens novel – and many government policies ensure that this inequality remains the status quo. While fighting to change those policies, we must also work towards ending the capitalism that they grow out of.
Published on May 23, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
