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Notes -
Migrant crisis on the third coast
Even at the best of times, the denizens of downtown Chicago streets don’t seem to be having a good time. They hold up carboard signs titled “20 dollars will get me a room tonight” or “my house burned down two weeks ago” (poor kid, he’s had that sign up for a year – he keeps getting houses and they keep burning down). But in the last 6 months a new denizen has taken up residence: the migrant family, sitting on the side of touristy main roads, sometimes selling candy and usually holding signs stating they’re from Venezuela. Every time I walk past these people, I wonder: what was your plan? Was the life you had in Venezuela really that much worse than sitting on the frozen streets of a foreign country begging for money?
This article from CBS gives an interview with a representative woman selling candy accompanied by her son. In the interview she claims she came to work but cannot do so because she can’t get the right permits. I would estimate there’s one of these families per downtown block, mostly women and young children but sometimes accompanied by a man.
(Despite claiming she has not been able to find enough food to eat, it is clear that few of these people have been running much of a calorie deficit)
Given this seems to be a new phenomenon, I’ve been wondering how the migrants plan to last out a Chicago winter that is not at all conducive to being outside. It seems some of them profiled by the Chicago Tribune are thinking the same thing.
The people interviewed are, despite being admitted to the US as asylum seekers, purely economic migrants, not fleeing oppression but coming for a better education for their children and work opportunities. One family lived in an apartment subsidized $15,000 by the city, couldn’t afford it once the subsidy ran out, and moved around a bit more before claiming they were giving up and returning to South America. The extent to which current Chicago residents are upset by the state of affairs is hard to tell, but I hear about more and more discontent at city council meetings. This week’s “This American Life” about the migrant crisis in New York portrayed a similar group of people surprisingly negatively, abandoning the legal fiction of "fleeing from violence" that the asylum seekers and traditional media use to justify the moral imperative of letting in economic migrants. The top comment on the podcast’s subreddit describes the migrants as “entitled”, an epithet I am inclined to agree with.
All of this said, I do have a bit of affinity for these people. If I had to choose one group to occupy the streets I’d certainly prefer the migrants than the aggressive “native” homeless in progressing states of mental decay. The migrants are clean, accompanied by well behaved children, and don’t bother you when walking down the street (in this way I also prefer them also to the third inhabitant of Chicago streets, lanyarded young workers of some nonprofit that will accost you with any question they judge will trick you into attention). The regular homeless population of Chicago smells terrible, yells, and makes the city feel dangerous enough that no women I know will take the train at night. In contrast, a relatively dignified family looking for work at least has motives that are comprehensible to me, even if I think they’ve made the wrong choice.
One question I have is did something change with the border in the last two years? Are we getting far more or were they some how all chilling in Houston before busing started? We never had this issue before and I don’t understand why they are everywhere it’s a lot of people.
These seem like people who would be great for a start up type city. Something like in Iowa where land is cheap, lacking full citizenship/freedom of movement, but with US rule of law.
On the American-Mexican border, this year the Biden administration implemented a policy intended to allow a stronger/politically-more-viable legal basis for ejecting migrants. In short, they created a remote-asylum application system as part of broader remote-immigration-permit systems. The nominal position is that migrants are to request the migration / asylum remotely from their own country, and then wait for the response of yay/nay. If they attempt to illegally immigrate before their application is complete, their digital-application can be rejected and they can be immediately deported as bad-faith applicants, and if they attempt to apply for asylum at the border without trying the app, they can be sent back to their countries and told to apply via the system.
The premise was somewhat undermined by various Biden exceptions to give various groups special permissions to stay, and the sheer numbers that kept coming after a temporary pause after the number of deportation flights was contrasted to the number of arrivals, and the sanctuary city migrant-bussing fiasco.
South of the American border, a number of different dynamics are taking place, centered primarily on spreading awareness via social media of safe-ish and commercially available migration services that have increased both awareness and perception of safety, sometimes with government facilitation.
Among other things-
-The Darian Gap, the link between Colombia and Panama, has seen functional guide services and entire social media channels and migration-facilitation industries between boats and forest guides and supply traders. The social media awareness of viable routes, legal strategies such as claiming asylum, and analysis/assessments of the US permissiveness of migrants once you reach there, are widespread. As with most businesses, as businesses scale, they compete and improve in pursuit of profit and client-share.
-Local governments in the Darian Gap, Panama, and Costa Rica, being overwhelmed if they try to stop or hinder the flow and at risk of criminal malingering if they just ignore it, have gradually adopted policies of functionally regulating migration flow independent of national level (let alone American) desires. A migrant you stop is your problem; a migrant you charge for a clean hotel room before moving on is a revenue source, and less likely to be working with the cartels against you. Local governments are in some places functionally legalizing/displacing the more harmful criminal types.
-Nicaragua in particular has started a racket of direct migrant shuttle flights from high-migration capitals to Nicaragua. In much the same way of the Belarusian migration crisis bringing Iraqis to the Polish border while the Belarusian government got the money for the 'tour packages,' Nicaragua basically relaxed visa-arrival restrictions and starting flying in planeloads of migrants from countries like Haiti and Cuba, and then gives the migrants a short amount of time to get out of the country starting from halfway up central america. Naturally Ortega makes his cuts, and while the US has pressured some airlines to stop, there's still plenty of money.
-Building on public awareness, the US domestic squabble of the Texas bussing of migrants to sanctuary cities was an international highlight on the, well, 'free reception' on hand if you did arrive in the US and reach a Sanctuary city. When internationally recognizable cities like New York complain that they can't continue to spend thousands of dollars a month per migrant providing food, housing, job permisions, and etc., that's not a problem- that's an advertisement to get it while you can.
-Finally, there has been increasing regional coordination between migration-transit countries on the subject. Some of this has been urged by the US, and some has been about, well, using migration as a way to urge changes in US policy that interest the coordinating powers. Not too long ago, there was a Mexican conference with many of the migration-sources, with one of the resolution points asserting a general right to migrate- implicitly obliging the US to not only accept migrants in general, but actively facilitate safe routes and legal avenues into the US. (Other points included removing the current US legal structure that gives greater asylum weight to people from repressive/anti-US countries, like Cuba.)
Put it together, and migration to the US has become hybrid government-private commercial business, with spreading awareness and perceptions of safety and reliability, with highly public 'win' conditions and regional governments sympathetic to further facilitating it.
Yes, good comment. Social media is also the major driver of illegal immigration from Africa to Europe. Before there was little knowledge of what ‘life in Europe’ is like. Now, they see what are essentially infomercial TikToks by the smugglers themselves about how great life in Europe is.
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