Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot recently called the challenge the city is facing in serving an influx of migrants a crisis created by the Republican governor of Texas. As an academic who studies and teaches refugee policy, I agree the crisis is manufactured, but its roots are much deeper and effects far-reaching. Before any knee-jerk reactions, we must understand why some people are invested in it as a crisis instead of a problem that can be solved.
Chicago has an outsize interest in a solution because we are the biggest destination city for asylum-seekers and migrants in the Midwest. Since last August, more than 3,800 migrants have been bused here from Texas. As a sanctuary city, it is in our interest to get the facts straight.
Notably, the U.S. government has dramatically narrowed access for people to ask for asylum legally and have their cases heard. People fleeing their countries are risking their lives to ask for asylum. Donald Trump, when he was president, systematically dismantled and starved the immigration infrastructure through his policies — resulting in the furloughing of thousands of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees, the imprisonment of children and the illegal detention of migrants. Because of such policies, asylum-seekers endanger their lives by crossing the Darien Gap only to face long lines and a wall. The U.S. could alleviate this issue by offering people alternative ways to request asylum.
Title 42, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed to stay in place, is an example of how the Trump administration chose to artificially, and temporarily, drive down asylum applications, only for the number of applicants to shoot up now. Turning away migrants suffering persecution is a violation of our international treaty obligations and our humanitarian foreign policy and is harmful to our economy. If Title 42 is revoked, there will be a temporary increase in people accessing asylum and being processed at the border, but there is no reason to think that this will be a long-term issue.
People who can prove they have a credible fear of persecution will be allowed to stay in the country, and those who don’t qualify can be deported. President Joe Biden just declared an overhaul of this bottleneck created at the border, and we should applaud that effort.
It is also important to remember that, geographically, our southern border is the only place where people can access asylum, a universal human right. The United States shares borders with only two countries, Mexico and Canada. Almost everyone asking for asylum accesses it at our southern border because to our north is Canada, a safe country. At one time, people could fly to one of our airports or access our territory on boats, but we have closed off those options. Airlines have been turned into de facto immigration agents because they are made to pay huge fines if they carry people to an airport where those passengers ask for asylum. The same is true for boats or ships.
Any person fleeing rape, violence, persecution, gangs or terror must find a way to make it to our southern border. There is no other way.
Instead of seeing this situation as a human rights nightmare, which it is, Americans are concentrating on reading it as a quasi-assault on our sovereignty. When the mayor of El Paso, Texas, Oscar Leeser, asked for additional resources, he was instead attacked for not declaring an emergency. Yes, asylum-seekers are at our border. We have the resources for processing their applications. Why aren’t we using them?
We need to ramp up the hiring of Department of Homeland Security staff. We need to create a system where all states step up to host asylum-seekers. We need to stop creating artificial bottlenecks in the system. And Chicago should continue using money that the federal government gives us to help settle people who are being treated as pawns in a political game.
There is a crisis at the border. But it’s most harmful for people risking their lives to access safety, not for us sitting and watching the news on television.
