--:-- Noelle King: The Democrats brought their biggest party to Chicago this week. Chicago! It's good to be home! A lot of joy. Chicago's also had a rough few years.
--:-- Noelle King: The only way Chicago survives, the only way, is we set our laws and we enforce our laws. The South Side is a troubled spot. It's very segregated, predominantly Black. It is chronically, and some say almost criminally, under-resourced.
--:-- Noelle King: When we ask and say what we want, we are still ignored. Now, two summers ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott started busing migrants into Chicago. More came to from Denver and Mexico. And people who already felt left behind got very angry.
--:-- Noelle King: What is this? Like, is this like they're setting up job training for them? Is that a bad thing if they're setting up job training for people? Why are they not setting up job training for us? Immigration may be the Democrats' biggest liability. And a crisis is unfolding just a couple miles away from the DNC.
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--:-- Noelle King: Find your flavor at senoritadrinks.com. Use code VOX20 for 20% off. Must be 21 and over. This product may cause intoxication. This product has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. This product may contain up to 0.3% THC.
--:-- Noelle King: This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King in Chicago. At least 46,000 newcomers to the city in the last two years. And where are they going? Well, a lot of them are going to the South Side.
--:-- Aisha Ray: I'm a developmental psychologist who raised her family on the South Side, and she says it was already hard done by the city. They don't have adequate child care programs for parents, after school programs. They don't have adequate physical activities like basketball groups or Little League.
--:-- Aisha Ray: Our kids systematically do not have access to these kinds of things. I think what has happened with the current migration issue, the most recent issues in the last year or so, is that it really raised for many black communities the question about what about us?
--:-- Aisha Ray: There are examples where an empty school building was promised to the community and it turned out to be a shelter for migrants. And this created a kind of anger.
--:-- Zoe Lee: This dynamic enrages me. She took me to a shuttered hotel on the South Shore that was reopened as a shelter for migrants.
--:-- Zoe Lee: Look at these cars. There's a hotel. Do you know, man? You're pointing to a nice Jeep. You're pointing to a couple of nice-looking sedans. And your assumption is that these are owned by migrants?
--:-- Zoe Lee: They are owned by migrants, not date your assumption. Do you know? And they get free parking. Do you know that we will get our stuff told?
--:-- Noelle King: Tuesday afternoon, I took the L to Woodlawn on the south side. All right, how close are we to King? Oh, we about like two minutes.
--:-- Noelle King: What's your name? My name is Caddy.
--:-- Caddy Bender: I met Caddy Bender on the train.
--:-- Noelle King: Now, I know that data shows the flow of migrants to Chicago slowed this year. But if you live in Woodlawn, it's easy to have missed that fact.
--:-- Caddy Bender: This is a serious problem. They is getting more benefit in the people who hear hunger and been on the streets all their life. And they came in and the president and the government and the mayor is taking care of them.
--:-- Noelle King: What if we get off together at King and then I can talk to you while we're out in the street? There's a little bit less noise.
--:-- Caddy Bender: You can walk with me because I'm ready to walk to the church. Wait, are you going to... The new beginning down the street. That's where I'm going.
--:-- Noelle King: Well, while we're walking to the church, you can tell me your story.
--:-- Caddy Bender: I work part-time doing deliveries for a nail salon. My rent is $570 a month, and I'm on my way to the church to pick up some food.
--:-- Caddy Bender: Money is very tight. I can't afford much extra anything.
--:-- Noelle King: Of particular irritation, Caddy can't afford to get a lady friend. She gonna need stuff. She needs, like, clothes wash. She needs, like, to get to work. She needs, like, to hang out with her friend because she's young.
--:-- Caddy Bender: All right, so you're not looking for a girlfriend. That part I get. But so it's very rare that the government, for example, is just going to hand anybody a check, including a migrant.
--:-- Noelle King: Right. But but you're you're talking about specific resources like housing and food stamps. Are those things that you could use?
--:-- Noelle King: I see that they wear better clothes than I'm here. They buy them clothes, getting them a gift card to buy clothes and give them a gift card to live and give them a gift card to go shopping and buy groceries and all that.
--:-- Caddy Bender: How do you feel about that?
--:-- Caddy Bender: I don't think that's right.
--:-- Noelle King: It takes about 10 minutes to walk to the church. Along the way, Caddy points out evidence of this neighborhood's distress.
--:-- Caddy Bender: There's the street that you can't walk safely because of the gangs. There's the shops. None of them are owned by black people, he says.
--:-- Caddy Bender: There's the housing project with the police out front. And then we get to the church.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: I'm the senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago. I'm also the CEO and founder of an organization called Project Hood. It is a not-for-profit that helps people to transform their lives.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Pastor is a local celebrity. He's often quoted in conservative media. He's a behave-yourself Republican, a get-a-job Republican, a be-a-man Republican.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: His political views as you going to hear shape his views on immigration But so does the reality of the South Side economy Here in this neighborhood where we are right now there was a McDonald that was closed a Walgreens that was closed, the grocery store closed, another grocery store that was closed.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: And so you see an area that has been hard hit economically and hard hit because of crime as well.
--:-- Noelle King: I want to ask you to take me back in your mind to the moment when you realized, hey, there's a lot of new people in Woodlawn that didn't used to be here.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: I think that moment occurred when, out of nowhere, we had about five Venezuelan and Colombian families come to the church. And some of the women were really broken, crying, and trying to get help.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: And I felt horrible because here are these individuals who have been led into our community and then just kind of left to fend for themselves.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: So I felt compelled that, listen, we have to do something, even though I have a real hard stance on immigration and how I think the border ought to be controlled and helped.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: My stance is, you know, I believe in I want people to come to America, but I want them to do it legally. I think we have these open borders, especially under the Harris and Biden leadership that they've just kind of allowed people to just come in.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: And I'm totally against that. I'm not for open borders. I'm not for people just being able to come in illegally and have all of this access. So I believe in a controlled border.
--:-- Noelle King: Well, those individuals who feel that way have a reason, a legitimate reason to feel that way. It's become a joke here how fast individuals get cars.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: These are individuals who come into the country and they haven't been here a month, but they have a car. And that's not fantasy. That's something that we see in reality. That's actually happening.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: There's a lot of assistance and a lot of money being spent. And so the pushback I'm hearing is I'm a resident of the South Side. I was here before. And you, the city, the state, the federal government, you didn't do that for us.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: In your mind, is that complaint real and justified and true?
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: That complaint is real and justified. Anytime we have children reading at a 6% or 4% proficiency, and our schools are in horrible condition, and then you bring individuals into our neighborhood, and you give them funds that could have gone toward bettering our educational system, that is a serious, serious issue.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Have you ever found yourself in a position where a migrant family or a migrant community or an individual has asked for help and you've said no?
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Absolutely not. If anyone comes to us needing help, we're going to figure out a way to help them. And especially if we communicate to them that, listen, you're going to have to help yourself as well.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: This is just not going to be some type of handout type of thing and they understand that, we go all out.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: There are individuals who have come into our country illegally, and for whatever reason, there are some people who are putting them first. We have to still roll up our sleeves. We have to still be accountable, and we have to still decide that we're going to make life better.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: We just can't lay down and just say, no one is helping me and cry all day. You talk like someone who has been voting Republican for a very long time.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: I have a lot of conservative principles, and I've been voting Republican for a long time. That would be a true statement.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: How do you feel about Kamala Harris?
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Well, you know, I think that her policies are lacking. I think she has not spelled out enough. And then a lot of people feel as if, too, She was the immigration czar, and she's added to the issues and problems that we're facing in the inner cities of America.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: The reason migrants came to Chicago was they were bused to Chicago by Texas's Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Do you have any animus toward him?
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: No, I think one of the reasons why they did that is because Chicago called itself a sanctuary city and said, hey, anybody from anywhere can come to Chicago and you'll be okay.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: I think that is the bigger problem. That title of being a sanctuary city and opening the door and inviting everyone to come, that's the issue.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: When you're speaking to your congregation and you know these concerns exist, there are new people coming in, they're getting things that we're not getting, life is really hard. And you know that in that same congregation, there may be some of these people who are recent arrivals to Chicago also listening to what you have to say.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: How do you preach about this?
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Yeah. Well, I just did a series on Job. And in that series, I talked about my opening statement. The most profound lesson that I've learned in life is this. Life is hard. Whether you're a Venezuelan, a Colombian, a Mexican, or an American, principles don't discriminate.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Love your neighbor is one of the greatest principles that has ever existed. And if we abide by that, regardless of how we feel about immigration, it will help us to love a lot of people and help a lot of people.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Before I left, Pastor Brooks introduced me to a pair from Venezuela who were at the church that day.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: Now, I don't speak Spanish, but here's what they said. They're happy to be here. They feel welcome here. We haven had any problems with the Americans they told me It that they see us interacting with others When they open up food kitchens when they hold events we there helping They see that the interaction between us and them is the same as with anyone else.
--:-- Pastor Corey Brooks: They see we're like other people. We haven't had any kinds of problems here.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up next, what immigration to Chicago and other cities could mean for the 2024 election.
--:-- Noelle King: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.
--:-- Noelle King: So we heard a lot of claims on the south side of Chicago. And the specifics on what kind of support newcomers are getting are a little hard to find.
--:-- Noelle King: We know, because the city publishes a nifty cost dashboard, that Chicago spent around $460 million on care for migrants.
--:-- Noelle King: The DNC actually complicated things a little bit. When the Dems chose Chicago last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott started sending even more buses here.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: My name is Geraldo Cadava. I'm a history professor at Northwestern University and a professor of Latina and Latino studies.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I wrote an article for The New Yorker in early April called Can Chicago Manage Its Migration Crisis?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Most people who try to pinpoint the start date for Chicago's migrant crisis will talk to you about the summer of 2022.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: It was around the time when Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis started shipping migrants from Latin America, from Florida, the Texas border, to Martha's Vineyard, to New York and to Chicago.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: New tonight, Governor Abbott's office announced they are now sending migrants from the border to Chicago. First bus arrived tonight at the city's Union Station.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Here in Chicago, I mean, I think there was a way in which me living up in the north side, I could kind of remain oblivious to it for the first couple of months because I think a lot of the migrants were being placed in shelters on the south side primarily.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: But I think as the numbers increased, the city had to kind of expand the footprint of migrants across the city.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Now, they plan to voice their concerns over a park district facility in the Edgewater neighborhood that's been used as a migrant shelter for almost half a year.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: The group wants neighborhood programming that so many depend on, including children and seniors, to return.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: They opened more shelters in different parts of the city. And I think that's when many in Chicago who don't live on the south side started seeing a lot of migrants.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And we started hearing a lot more about African-American communities having very mixed feelings, to say the least, about the situation.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: When I was on the South Side yesterday talking to people in those African-American communities, one thing that I heard repeatedly was they put them here.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: They didn't have to put them on the South Side, but they put them in our neighborhoods.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Yes. It sounds like that is also your understanding.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: It is. It is. I mean, it's for a lot of different reasons, I think.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I don't think it's just a desire of the city to impose migrants to kind of create a conflict in the neighborhood.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: But the way it was explained to me was that a lot of it stemmed from the fact that 10, 12 years ago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed many high schools in the city.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And many of those high schools were on the South Side. This is all they ever know for all the years of their life of being in school.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And you're going to take that away from them? Roman, man, whoever, I want him to get down here and I want him to come and have a meeting with us.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And so when the city was thinking about what vacant spaces do we have available to us, a lot of the vacant spaces they had available were on the South Side.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I wonder if you can walk us through the process of what happens when an undocumented immigrant arrives in Chicago.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Well, they come in the buses or in a plane. I mean, O'Hare was also a kind of landing point for them as well.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And so they would ostensibly use the shelter as a temporary residence while they looked for jobs, got their kids settled in schools.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: But for many of them the kind of very temporary stays turned into longer stays
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And that when we started reading reports about unsafe conditions or unsanitary conditions the outbreak of various illnesses or you know the lack of good sources of water showers those sorts of things
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Not enough supplies, not great amount of food, very little shower capability, toilets, things like that.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: The basics are really very are missing here. It's been heartbreaking.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: When you were doing your reporting for the New Yorker on the South Side, did you hear sentiments like they have nicer clothes than us?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: The city is giving them money and food stamps. They have new cars.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I heard those things and more. I mean, I heard that they were, you know, all getting $9,000 as soon as they arrived in the city and buying homes.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I mean, I heard that and I was like, well, what kind of home can you buy for $9,000? I don't know.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: But there was certainly the sense that resources were flowing to the migrants that could be going to communities in Chicago that have been asking for greater resources for a long time.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: When they talked about $9,000, new shoes, clothes, houses, in the case of the person I talked to, I just heard it more as an expression of their frustration that they had been forgotten.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: To what extent then are new migrants, so it's been two years since the buses first came, to what extent are they integrated into the formal economy?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And to what extent are they in more of the gray economy, working under the table, selling things on the street?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I think it's a full range. You know, I talked to people who did find something that sounded more like stable work, either cleaning houses, working in a restaurant, things like that.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: But then, you know, you also just see throughout the city, families basically asking for handouts.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Can you talk about the case for these people being here, the case for the necessity of people being here?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Yeah, totally. You know, Chicago has lost population. You know, the black population in Chicago has declined.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Many, many black people are moving either to the suburbs or even back to the south, a kind of reverse great migration.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And so I've heard the argument that we need migrants to do the work that had been done by people who'd left the city.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I think Chicago, like New York, you know, has the advantage for migrants of having big Latino communities.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: You know, I mean, for migrants, it's a kind of welcoming place to come to because they can speak Spanish easily.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: They can find grocery stores easily that sell the things that they're looking for, you know.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: So they may benefit the city. And on the flip side of that, or maybe adjacent to that, I want you to just consider, knowing what you know, the idea that many people are coming here to get nice shoes and nice clothes.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Yeah, sure. And food stamps. Yeah, sure.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Here I will put on my kind of academic hat a little bit and just say that that is a very old idea about migrants coming to the United States to kind of leech off of the United States and take our resources.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: But I think that immigrant rights organizations have tried to respond by talking about the many, many contributions that migrants make to the United States in particular communities.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I mean, I just heard the president of the United Farm Workers talking this morning about how, you know, all of you sitting in this room probably aren't going to need a lawyer or a doctor today, but you will need to eat three times today.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And so you benefit from a migrant being here more often than you benefit from the services of a lawyer or a doctor or something like that.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: You know, one thing I found really interesting is I've given talks about Latino conservatism and the work that I'm doing in the field of Latino history.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: I give talks at universities where a lot of the students are the sons or daughters of immigrants.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And they always want to ask this question at the end about like, you know, how should I feel about this?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Because for the first time, I feel like my family is being directly impacted by the presence of other migrants.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: In what way?
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Well, they say that their parents' court dates for legalization, naturalization, temporary work status, whatever, their family's court cases have been delayed because the courts have been inundated with these new cases to process.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And so it was unfamiliar to me to hear young Latinas and Latinos feel very conflicted about immigration.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: Because, you know, from having taught Latino history for 15 or 16 years, I mean, young Latinos, college students, they've kind of uniformly been on the side of immigrant rights.
--:-- Geraldo Cadava: And they feel more conflicted about it now because it's impacting their families directly.
--:-- Noelle King: Professor Geraldo Cadava.
--:-- Avishai Artsy: Avishai Artsy produced today's show.
--:-- Hadi Mawajdeh: Hadi Mawajdeh produced and reported.
--:-- Miranda Kennedy: Miranda Kennedy edited.
--:-- Laura Bullard: Laura Bullard fact-checked.
--:-- Patrick Boyd: Patrick Boyd engineered.
--:-- Rob Byers: Rob Byers engineered.
--:-- Noelle King: Thanks to Amina El-Sadi in Washington.
--:-- Noelle King: Thanks in Chicago to Brian Alexander, Andre Smith, Dylan Sharkey, Amy Helato, and Daniel Borzutski.
--:-- Noelle King: Tomorrow, the biggest speech of Kamala Harris' life.
--:-- Noelle King: Sean and I will be in your ears with analysis.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King in Chicago.
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained.
