Episode 51: What Happened When the Migrant Crisis Came to Chicago?
Busloads of migrants have been arriving in northern cities for the past two years, testing the patience of some residents and bringing out empathy in others. We go to Chicago to find out what the real, local effects of this surge are — not just what the politicians with their megaphones say they are. And we explore some solutions to a problem that has become the number one issue on voters' minds in this crucial election year.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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[SOUNDS OF A JUNGLE]
Julio: We crossed the jungle. The name of the jungle is Darién, between Columbia and Panama, walking on foot.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
Julio: I was afraid to, to die.
Like so many migrants, Julio, along with his wife, kids, and grandchild, made the treacherous journey from Venezuela to the Texas-Mexico border last summer.
Julio: So I said, well if I die here, how they gonna make it after? I have to do this, I have to do it. I, I can’t, I can’t quit. I have to keep going. I have to move forward, for them.
When he got to the U.S., Julio crossed the border, and he and his family claimed asylum, a protection intended for refugees who can prove that they’re fleeing persecution. That entered them into a legal process that could take years to play out. Then, like tens of thousands of other migrants, Julio and his family headed north.
Julio: My first option was New York City, but I met a guy who lived here for more than 10 years and he told me, you know what? New York City is not a good place to raise a family. My second option was Washington. But the same guy told me, Okay, but Washington is a very expensive city to live. And my third option was Chicago. So here I am.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
This is part two of our series on America's migrant crisis. This is a complex issue. So we’ve decided to zoom in on one of the places where it’s all playing out: the city of Chicago, which has a “sanctuary city” policy, meaning that local authorities won’t turn information over to the feds about an immigrant’s legal status to be in the U.S. It’s also a city with a long history of taking in immigrants, including asylum seekers. In fact, one migrant told us he came to Chicago because when he was at the U.S,-Mexico border, he was told it was a good city to come to.
Joliver: Ya estando en en la frontera de México con, con Estados Unidos. Se escuchaba mucho. Eso se escuchaba mucho en los Chester, en los albergues, no. Chicago es un buen estado para llegar. Ayudan, ayudan, eh? Te protegen.
Because in Chicago people help you, they protect you and give you more opportunities.
Joliver: Te protegen. Te dan más, más oportunidades.
But Chicago has struggled to cope with the arrival of this particular wave of migrants, about 40,000 people to date, mostly from Venezuela, and how to house them and how to pay for it all. And some Chicago communities — even some of the neighborhoods named after the immigrant groups that have historically settled there — have questioned whether the city should even be helping these migrants at all.
Andre Vasquez: When you think about the history, uh, and then you look at how the immigration issues impacted our city now, it, it really is, tragic. It's created a wedge.
ARCHIVAL Chicagoan 1: I am also an immigrant. And I believe that we should help others, but we also need to take care of ourselves. We need to take care of our own community. We need to fix our problems at home first.
ARCHIVAL Chicagoan 2: I don't want to worry about when I’m walking on the sidewalk every day: who, who are those people? Do you know them? Can you guarantee our safety?
These newcomers, people like Julio and his family, are being called by some a significant threat. But how is the arrival of these migrants really affecting a city like Chicago? For American voters, the “migrant crisis” is now the single most important issue of the 2024 election. Presidential candidate Donald Trump says it’s a crisis that could destroy the U.S.
So how has the controversial move to transfer migrants from border states to northern cities shifted the politics around immigration? And what more could the U.S. be doing to solve the problem?
We’re headed to Chicago to find out.
I’m Peter Bergen, Welcome to In the Room.
[THEME MUSIC]
Julio and his family made it to Chicago last summer.
Julio: We arrived Chicago. We went to a police station, the 55th police station. We spent only two days there.
For about a year police stations became the first stop for migrants like Julio and his family as the city tried to figure out what to do with them. Police stations! It sounds kind of hard to imagine. And yet that’s exactly what the residents of Chicago were seeing as these Venezuelan migrants were being bussed in. Lots of families, often with really young children, living at police stations, spilling out onto the sidewalks, in neighborhoods all around the city. Sometimes these migrants spent weeks, or even months at these police stations as they waited for a spot in the shelter system.
Peter Bergen: I must say I was sort of blown away reading about folks that were basically sleeping outside police stations. I don't remember migrants in large numbers sleeping in or outside police stations in any American city.
Andre Vasquez: Yeah, no, it's absolutely unprecedented.
Andre Vasquez is a member of Chicago’s City Council and he’s the chair of its Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Andre Vasquez: Babies, diapers on and no shirt, walking barefoot on a police station floor at the same time somebody's being brought in for questioning, just horribly soul breaking things you would not have imagined you'd see in the third largest city in the country.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
[SOUNDS OF THE SCENE OUTSIDE A POLICE STATION, MIGRANTS CHATTING, CARS PASSING, MUSIC PLAYING]
Volunteer 1: You see a lot of like, just the signs of life. like a living room. But a really messy living room.
Picture the scene in front of the police station, just south of downtown Chicago which looks like something between a messy living room and a campsite. More than a dozen tents of different colors and sizes are pitched in front of the entrance to the police station, along with a few strollers and shopping carts.
Volunteer 2: So if you were to pass by here and just see what's happening, you know, the first thing you see are all the tents.
Some families with little kids are sleeping inside the lobby of the police station. And there’s a group of volunteers who’ve come to help.
Volunteer 1: I'm very concerned because I look in the 10-day forecast and it's going to get very cold. And they just aren't prepared for what lies ahead.
These are two of the local volunteers who’ve been helping out migrants over the past year and a half. They organize food deliveries and transfers to shelters. And they say that living at the police station can really take its toll on the migrants.
Volunteer 2: There's one woman who was starting to have, you know, mental health issues because she was here too long.
This volunteer says she came by to make a donation and then she kinda never left.
Volunteer 2: Some kids needed shoes, clothes, you know so I gathered all that, and then came into the station and handed them out, whatever I had and, and then never turned back since then. [SHE LAUGHS] I'm here almost every day. [SHE LAUGHS]
People drive by all day long and drop off all kinds of stuff. And there’s a stir of excitement when a new donation arrives. Like a bright blue, new-looking puffy coat.
Volunteer 1: That’s nice, that's a Columbia down jacket.
Volunteer 2: No, there's, I mean, there's definitely a lot of nice stuff that gets dropped off.
Volunteer 1: But some people are not well-intentioned. They're just like, wow, I can just dump all my stuff from my apartment when I move and it gets, it gets cleaned up.
Actually, you wouldn’t believe the stuff that people drop off. Dirty old clothes, of course, but also some pretty bizarre things too, like broken appliances and hair extensions.
Volunteer 2: What else have we gotten dropped off?
Volunteer 1: The broken blender,
Volunteer 2: The blender, the snow cone machines…
Volunteer 3: Oh the snow cone machines!
Volunteer 2: Yeah, we've had a cat dropped off.
Volunteer 3: Oh yeah, we have a cat. The latest. The latest was a cat. [LAUGHTER] The cat is just the cherry on the top. [LAUGHTER]
These volunteers were here most days, sometimes for hours. And there were lots of volunteers like them helping at police stations around Chicago. People who’ve stepped in to help provide food and clothes, even do the laundry, for the tens of thousands of people who’ve arrived in the city with no local ties and nowhere to stay.
Andre Vasquez: You've seen volunteers — we're talking hundreds of people in about a year and a half that have been providing food, clothing, showers, shelter, right, daycare, all volunteer-based, all just neighbors stepping up to help in a way that really shows the best of what our city and our nation can do in this moment.
Vasquez has a lot of praise for the initiative taken by all these volunteers, like a community center that transformed overnight into a hub for donations.
Andre Vasquez: You'd feel like you were walking in, like, the smallest Costco on the planet. You've had all these, like, dry goods, and food, and soup cans, and shoes of all different sizes, and sweaters because everyone had been volunteering. And that was happening every single day.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
So, how did Chicago — a city more than 1,000 miles from the southern border — find itself housing and feeding all these migrants in the first place? Well that’s because back in 2022, Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida began bussing and flying migrants from their states to a group of Democratic-leaning cities in the north. At first, the numbers were small and it was more of a political stunt playing out in cities like Chicago, Denver, and New York City.
ARCHIVAL Greg Abbott: Now New Yorkers and people in Washington, D.C., are having to deal with it. And now Texas is sharing our pain with the rest of the country.
But the number of busloads grew. And cities began to struggle to keep up. Then, in the spring of 2023, Title 42 — a COVID-related health measure that had kept many asylum seekers from staying in the United State — well, that expired, and more people began claiming asylum.
That’s around the same time that Chicago elected a new mayor, a former school teacher named Brandon Johnson. He campaigned on a promise to make this historically segregated city a place that "works for everyone" by addressing the root causes of some of Chicago’s most protracted problems, like violence and homelessness. At his inauguration, he sounded optimistic about his ability to make good on those promises, and also to incorporate the new migrants arriving in Chicago.
ARCHIVAL Brandon Johnson: Because there's enough room for everyone in the city of Chicago
And at least at that moment this message was well-received.
ARCHIVAL Brandon Johnson: Whether you are seeking asylum or you are looking for a fully funded neighborhood [CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
But after his inauguration, those migrant drop-offs accelerated. And the scale of the problem got much bigger. It’s not that migrants have never come to these cities before, but normally, when migrants choose where to go, they tend to disperse across many cities and states in the U.S. But Governor Abbott’s bussing of migrants from Texas has meant that much larger groups of people were arriving in Chicago all at once. So Johnson, along with the mayors of Denver and New York City, went to Washington to urge the Biden administration to do more. And Chicago’s mayor made his case in the media.
ARCHIVAL Brandon Johnson: Well, what we have is clearly an international and federal crisis that local governments are being asked to subsidize. And this is unsustainable. None of our local economies are, um, positioned to be able to carry on such a mission.
And New York’s mayor went even further.
ARCHIVAL Eric Adams: This issue will destroy New York City. The city we knew we're about to lose.
One of the biggest challenges Chicago has faced: where to put all these people? The city opened 28 shelters in a year and a half to house the migrants. And they put them pretty much anywhere they could: in warehouses, former schools, hotels, churches, even a public library. But the process of deciding where to put those shelters has often been contentious and that’s putting it mildly. Multiple lawsuits have been filed to try to stop the city from opening some of these shelters. So while there have been a lot of people volunteering their time to help all the newcomers, there's also been a lot of opposition.
ARCHIVAL Chicagoan 3: So I'm sorry, but they don't deserve to be getting all the money. They're getting already housing, food, everything. And we still got to give them more. Why? There's homeless out there who don't even have what they're getting.
ARCHIVAL Chicagoan 4: They disrespect us! They rob us! They harass us!
ARCHIVAL Chicagoan 5: We're inviting in like a magnet. Everybody come here, collect all your freebies! We're going to give it to you! Every sucker in here is going to pay for it!
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
This is the Chicago that Julio and his family landed in last summer. He says after their first couple of nights staying at a police station, they moved into one of those shelters. A volunteer helped get them a spot, a woman Julio refers to as his “fairy godmother.”
[SOUNDS OF STREET AMBIENCE NEAR SHELTER]
The shelter is an industrial-looking building that was converted to house the migrants. It’s on a busy city street in an area with mostly offices and warehouses.
Julio: The shelter is okay. I can't complain to be honest. Each floor, each floor is a huge open space shared with more than 25, 30 families.
Despite the frigid January weather in Chicago, there are lots of people hanging out front, several dressed in shorts, even flip-flops. It can be hard to share the space with a big group of people, and to live without privacy for such a long time. But Julio says the bathrooms are always clean.
Julio:At least we have a roof, okay?
And now he knows that not all Americans have a bed to sleep in, or three meals a day.
Julio: I have seen American people here sleeping in the street. This is just a, a transition, you know? This help is just to make you get on your feet. It's gonna be a big mistake if you think that this is gonna be forever.
And while Julio says he can’t complain, there have been plenty of complaints about these shelters — complaints by some Chicagoans who are angry that much needed resources have been diverted away from their neighborhoods so the city can pay to feed and house the migrants. In fact in 2023, Chicago spent more than one hundred million dollars on the migrants, and there are estimates that hundreds of millions more could be spent this year. On top of all that, there have been plenty of complaints about the conditions inside the shelters.
ARCHIVAL Andre Vasquez: Today we have one item on the agenda, which is a subject matter hearing with no votes to be taken…
The committee that Vasquez heads up has been tracking whether city agencies have been addressing the problems that have come up. That’s included things like infestations…
ARCHIVAL Chicago Official: In terms of bedbugs, we work with and follow CDPH infection prevention guidelines. Same thing goes for lice…
And even recent outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis. It’s something Vasquez feels personally responsible for helping to fix.
Andre Vasquez: There was a baby that had scabies who was in a shelter and like, what do you even do in that situation when you're a committee chair?
Peter Bergen: Tell us about a day in your life. What does it look like?
Andre Vasquez: So it's making sure that our staff is on top of it, that I'm checking in with our chief of staff and our directors, which it sounds like a larger fleet of a team. It's like five people are able to address these issues. Then it's meeting with the deputy mayor and talking to their staff and going, well, you know, what's the plan forward? It is constant. It is nonstop. Maybe I get a meal in while I'm checking emails. Uh, then I come home, if I'm lucky, I get to tuck the kids in for about five minutes before they go to sleep. Then have Netflix playing in the background while checking some more emails.
Peter Bergen: Your parents immigrated from Guatemala to Chicago and you grew up in an undocumented household. How did that affect you?
Andre Vasquez: Um, I've got a chip on my shoulder. You know how much harder you have to push. Bootstrap narrative sets in a lot deeper when you're an immigrant or in an immigrant family. Having to translate for your parents, having to navigate through a school system on your own, not knowing how to, like, apply to high school or to college, being the one that has to figure that out. One you do, you become resourceful, you figure out how to solve it, but, there is a resentment that I think if you had met me in my twenties and my thirties, you'd understand kind of where the angst of, of that voice comes from when you feel like you're in an inequitable situation and you're getting screwed by it.
Peter Bergen: And of course, Chicago is a city of immigrants in many ways. How has the city of Chicago reacted to this sort of new wave of immigrants coming from, mostly from Venezuela?
Andre Vasquez: Yeah, I'll say it's not acting like a city of immigrants is what it feels like here, right? So it really is, in some ways, um, tragic, right? So, because the migrants who are coming in now are largely Venezuelan and Latino, it's caused this division because Chicago has also been historically so segregated that its black community, its brown communities have been largely under-invested and marginalized. And so when you have a city where its black folk have not had the support and if anything have been subjugated, um, and then they're watching a new community come in and getting all these support systems in place. There's a, um, there's a resentment that you can kind of feel and a pain that if you didn't understand where it came from would feel like anger. And so being in the middle of the situation, like I've had to go to all the different community shelter openings in different neighborhoods and had to like firsthand hear and address some of what that pain felt like.
One of the items on Vasquez’s non-stop schedule is a “Know Your Rights” event at a Chicago school, where immigrants can learn about laws in Chicago and in the U.S.As soon as he walks in, Vasquez is swarmed by people, some of whom he knows,
Andre Vasquez: That's it. I'm an email away. Anything at all.
Event Attendee 1: I know, I know you are.
Andre Vasquez: Happy to help.
Others he doesn’t.
Event Attendee 2: Tengo dos meses in Chicago.
Andre Vasquez: Dónde vive usted?
Event Attendee 2: Al lado del Elston Avenue.
Andre Vasquez: Elston y qué?
It’s the kind of event that Vasquez wishes his family had when he was a kid.
Andre Vasquez: It's challenging enough when you come to a new country to have an understanding of like, what your rights are, how you navigate through a community, what the rules are.
Vasquez steps up onto the school’s auditorium stage and welcomes the packed audience — about 150 people. People who were looking bored suddenly start paying attention when he speaks.
Andre Vasquez: Welcome to Chicago.
Actually, he doesn’t just welcome them. He tells them you are from Chicago now.
Andre Vasquez: Ustedes son, son de Chicago ahora.
Sometimes people treat us differently…
Andre Vasquez:A veces tratan nostra gente diferente.
But I’m Guatemalan, and my family came here in 1978, and we know that in every generation, people come here from other countries for the promise of a better life for their children.
Andre Vasquez: Pero lo que sabemos es que yo soy guatemalteco y mi familia vino aquí en como 1978 y lo que sabemos aquí en este país en cada generación, viene gente de otros países porque quieren la promesa de una vida mejor para sus hijos.
And then he does something pretty remarkable.
Andre Vasquez: Yo voy, les doy mi numero… celular,
He gives everyone in the audience his cell phone number.
Andre Vasquez:Si ustedes quieren sacar sus teléfonos… No me llamen en la noche. [LAUGHTER] No, no pueden! Mensaje de texto es mejor.
But don’t call me at night, he says. Text messages are better, ok?
Andre Vasquez: Pero, ¿están listos?
It’s a moment like this that makes you think: it’s great that Chicago has people like Vasquez, working day and night to help these migrants. But does this kind of retail approach make sense given the scale of the problem? Shouldn’t the federal government be doing more to deal with the problem in the first place? Why are these migrants so dependent on the city for help or a city councilman who is so busy he barely sees his kids anymore?
Part of their dependence on the city of Chicago is due to the fact that many of these migrants are not allowed to work — despite the fact that many places in the U.S., with unemployment near historic lows, actually need people right now who want to work — from working in restaurants to picking produce to staffing meatpacking plants. Vasquez’s parents were among these kinds of workers.
Andre Vasquez: My dad who was a shoe repair worker, and my mom who worked at an envelope factory, worked themselves to the bone, where you would see the arthritis kick in. As soon as I could get a job, getting as many jobs as I could get, right? Trying to make sure I could contribute to the family.
Volunteers at the police station said that more than new winter coats or shoes, there’s one thing that the migrants who’ve come to Chicago want more than anything else.
Volunteer 1: Jobs.
Volunteer 2: Jobs.
Volunteer 4: Jobs.
Volunteer 2: Yeah, they want to make their own money. They want to support themselves. They're not here for our handouts.
But it’s not up to the city of Chicago to decide who can and can’t work in the U.S. legally. Getting permission to work depends on the status of a migrant’s visa or asylum claim. Many of the Venezuelan migrants in Chicago are seeking asylum in the U.S. And when they become part of that legal process, federal law requires that they wait for six months for authorization to work.
In September, President Biden announced that, under rules established by Congress decades ago, migrants from Venezuela who’d arrived by July 31, 2023 would be given Temporary Protected Status, which is a designation that allowed them to work right away. But people who arrived even a day later, still had to wait for six months to work.
Peter Bergen: This work authorization is very important because, the fact that they're not allowed to work in many cases is really kind of counterproductive, it seems to me.
Andre Vasquez: What would seem to be a common-sense solution — you have tens of thousands of people coming. You get them work authorization. Now they become taxpayers. Now it's actually helping create an economic boom for the country. It makes sense to kind of help ease that path. But what we see is depending on where you're coming from, the experience isn't the same. So we’ve had 30,000 people in Chicago that are largely Venezuelan, that have been sleeping in police stations because they can't get work, they don't have shelter. In the same amount of time, you've seen 30,000 Ukrainian refugees come and you've never seen a Ukrainian sleep on a police station floor. Right? Like, the federal government has decided that there's incentives, there's funding, there's support systems they're willing to give to one group that they're not willing to, to make the same changes for another.
These Ukrainian refugees who are fleeing the brutal war in their country came to Chicago through temporary humanitarian programs that gave them immediate permission to work. In Chicago, there’s also a big Ukrainian community for them to plug into — networks of relatives and friends, who can offer housing assistance and support. We’re going to hear some more about one of those programs in a minute. The Venezuelans didn’t have these same kinds of networks, so they’re much more reliant on the city for help. Vasquez says that only some migrants living in Chicago’s shelters are currently allowed to work.
Andre Vasquez: Now out of the 15,000 that we're talking about in shelter, only 4,000 are able to apply or able to get, you know, some level of authorization. So that leaves the majority of people not being able to do so.
But work authorization, like so many other details of immigration policy, is part of a delicate balancing act. It stands to reason that if all Venezuelan migrants received this protected status and permission to work on arrival in the United States, it could incentivize more of them to come to the U.S. But for a migrant like Julio, it’s simply maddening that he isn’t allowed to work.
In fact, when we met him, he was working anyway — just not legally.
Julio: I have to work. Why I have to work? First because I, I can't, I can't be here in this shelter, spend the whole day doing nothing. So I want to feel, I want to feel that I am a, a useful, a useful person. Okay? Second, I have to save some money to face what, what comes.
Julio has one big asset that so many migrants applying to jobs can't claim. He speaks English! That allowed him to get a customer service job for a while.
Julio: I work in a store. This store sells, uh, furs, jackets, uh, uh, coats. Uh, it's a well known store in the city. I don't want to say the name of the store. I do everything there. Everything.
The owner of the store knows that Julio isn't allowed to work. But Julio says the owner empathized with him as a migrant himself, telling him:
Julio:I know what it feels like to be in your place, to come to a country with this, which is not yours, wanting to work. And you can’t do it because you, you, you don't have the work papers. So I know what it feels like to be there.
But Julio says the job isn’t secure, the store owner told him that sales go down in the spring. And without the legal ability to work he’s worried he might not find another job so easily.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Cecilia Muñoz: This system isn't going to work until we take a hard look at our laws.
Cecilia Muñoz understands better than most that what’s happening on the ground in Chicago is the result of decades-long gridlock in Congress, which has failed to reform immigration laws.
Today’s reality is that much larger numbers of people are coming to the border from more countries, many of them claiming asylum. To successfully receive asylum they have to prove that they would likely face persecution if they returned to their home countries.
I wanted to talk to Munoz because she’s one of those rare people who isn’t just admiring the problem, but has concrete solutions to offer. She’s been working on this issue for over 30 years, five of them as President Barack Obama’s Domestic Policy Advisor, and she’s also on the board of New America, where I work. And in 2021 she became one of the founders of a bipartisan initiative to resettle refugees called Welcome.US.
Cecilia Muñoz: Welcome.US was founded in an effort to connect regular people, regular Americans to the process of resettling migrants and refugees. If you and I were Canadians, we could sponsor a refugee family, but in the United States, we couldn't, just as regular individuals.
Peter Bergen: And when you say sponsor, what does that mean?
Cecilia Muñoz: It means all of the help and support that you would think of a refugee or a migrant needs. It can mean literally from greeting folks at the airport to arranging their housing, to helping them make the adjustment to English, to helping with jobs, helping enroll kids in school. It is an enormous undertaking.
Traditionally, the U.S. has settled refugees with the assistance of some partner organizations, including religious groups and nonprofits, that get federal funding. But then the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 and received a sudden influx of 85,000 Afghan refugees in a short period.
Cecilia Muñoz: And so we launched Welcome.US to help with that. And really… had such a good experience getting civil society involved in the work of helping resettle Afghans — veterans groups, uh, you know, service organizations, people who hadn't done refugee resettlement before, but who stood up because they felt it was important. And that was so successful that when Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukrainians started showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border because it was the only way in, the administration reached out and said, “Do you think that sponsors would come forward to help resettle Ukrainians?” We knew the answer to that was an enthusiastic yes. So they started using an authority that they have to provide what's called humanitarian parole.
This program is a larger-scale version of Julio’s “fairy godmother,” and those volunteers you heard from outside the Chicago police station — giving Americans the ability to sponsor migrants whether they’re relatives or strangers, to help them have a smooth transition into the U.S. And Muñoz says that effort was so successful, that the Biden Administration decided to run the same play again.
Cecilia Muñoz: And they're using their humanitarian authority to provide 30,000 visas a month for people from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. And about a couple million Americans have stepped forward to sponsor them.
Peter Bergen: Well, it turns out a lot of Americans are very generous.
Cecilia Muñoz: Yes! Peter, I have to say, If you had told me two years ago we would be, in short order, arriving at a point where 2 million Americans had stepped forward to sponsor people, from 10,000 zip codes in every state of the union, I'm not sure I would have believed you. In fact, I'm sure I wouldn't have believed you. But as you say, it turns out, even in this moment of a lot of ugliness in our country, and a lot of ugliness with respect to immigrants, Americans are better than we remembered that we are [PETER LAUGHS] and, I say this with all humility as a veteran of immigration and refugee policy for more than 30 years… we are generous and, capable of more than I thought we were.
Peter Bergen: The other strength of Welcome.US, to me, is what a clearly bipartisan effort it is.
Cecilia Muñoz: Yes. Yes, and it’s stayed out of politics on purpose because, as you know, the politics around immigrants is terrible. The strongest messaging is not about the people that we are bringing. It's about us and who we are as Americans, as welcomers.
Peter Bergen: Okay, so let's do the thought experiment where there's somebody in the Venezuelan diaspora sponsoring somebody from Venezuela. Is that person that they're sponsoring from Venezuela already deemed to be a refugee or a legitimate asylum seeker? Or is it some sort of deal they're cooking up between themselves to get this other person into the country…
Cecilia Muñoz: It's the right question. And I think there is a lot of good work still ahead of us, including policy work and humanitarian work, to make sure that as we make visas available, that we make them available to the people who are the most vulnerable. If you provide a, a legal pathway, a visa, for people to come, they will choose that visa over walking across the Darién Gap and traversing all of Mexico to get to the United States and all of Central America.
In the first several months, U.S. immigration officials received 1.5 million applications from Americans who wanted to sponsor migrants — far more than enough to cover the 30,000 asylum seekers being let in each month. And it’s taking some pressure off of the border by giving migrants the chance to come in an orderly way.
Cecilia Muñoz: It stands to reason that if you were sitting at your kitchen table in one of these countries contemplating moving because you felt you had to in order to survive, you would choose a visa program with a sponsor any day over walking.
But while letting in 30,000 people in a month might sound like a lot, a program like this still can’t keep up with demand.
Cecilia Muñoz: The, the 30,000 visas a month shared between four countries is tiny compared to the volume of need with respect to Venezuelans. You're talking about millions of people on the move, literally millions so the scale of the problem is really the challenge here. In the years that I worked in the Obama administration, I can remember doing the analysis of like, how much money would you need to hire enough judges to make this process smoother and, and more functional. And the conclusion was that it wasn't just about money. That you, even if you threw lots of money at the problem, it's literally not possible. The scale of the challenge is bigger than a court system can handle. What the administration is trying to do is to use what it's called the asylum court, a group of asylum adjudicators to take the process out of the courts so that you can adjudicate these cases more quickly.
A sped-up adjudication process like this was one of the proposed changes in a bipartisan bill that failed to advance in the U.S. Senate in February and never came up for a vote in the Republican-controlled House, because former President Donald Trump opposed the bill.Trump, of course, is making immigration a key issue in his 2024 presidential campaign.
If that bill had passed, more than 4,000 asylum officers would’ve been hired with the ability to grant or reject asylum applications, something that today only around 600 immigration judges can do. That piece of bipartisan legislation failed.
Meanwhile, recent polls show that immigration has become the number one election issue for Americans. That made me wonder: is the bussing of migrants north to cities like Chicago, changing the way Americans think about immigration? I put this to Muñoz: could bussing migrants from the border states — stunt or not — ultimately move Congress to act in a sensible way on immigration?
Cecilia Muñoz: Well, ideally, that's what would happen. I think as a practical matter, what we had was a mayor of New York, he seemed to have a bigger interest in attacking the president for the problem than he did in actually working with the administration to try to address it.
ARCHIVAL Eric Adams: We're getting no support on this national crisis, and we're receiving no support. And let me tell you something…
Peter Bergen: In fairness, the New York governor also said much the same thing, right? She said New York is closed. So the Democratic governor, Democratic mayor of New York City, both said versions of we just can't take any more people.
Cecilia Muñoz: Yeah. Yeah. And in some ways that was exactly the reaction that I think Governor Abbott hoped to provoke and he did. But then, you know, there's coverage of other places in the United States, like Pittsburgh, for example, which was getting ready for migrants and hoping for migrants because, frankly, they needed, they need workers. And, you know, the buses aren't being sent there. The buses are being sent really for political purposes. I mean, there was only one reason to send a busload on Christmas Eve to the vice president's residence last year in freezing cold weather. That was political. Sending them to Martha's Vineyard was political. But you're right that it has kind of focused the politics of this issue. And it has upped the ante and kind of upped the visibility that we need to get to solutions here.
This example of a city like Pittsburgh raising its hand to say they need workers, while other cities have more new arrivals than they can handle, just seems to scream for a comprehensive, national solution. But when it comes to immigration, nothing is simple, or easy.
Cecilia Muñoz: The thing I find frustrating, and I say this as a former government official who is deeply familiar with what tools the government does and doesn't have here, is the assumption that the Biden administration has tools that it could be using that it's just not using, because that's not, it's not actually true. Congress is not stepping up to that plate. And honestly, the Republicans in Congress prefer chaos because they can make political hay with it.
Peter Bergen: Some people may have forgotten that the Democrats were the party that was kind of against immigration if you go back several decades. Because trade unions and Democrats had the view that excessive immigration would depress wages. I mean, the politics around this have really switched. You've sort of lived a lot of that in your own career. How have the politics changed between the parties on this issue?
Cecilia Muñoz: That's right. The norm for most of the last century is that there are factions in both parties, and that the Democrats have a strong pro-immigrant faction, but also have a faction that is worried about the impact of immigrants, especially on U.S. workers. And Republicans have both factions. They have a strong restrictionist faction, but they also have traditionally a faction that sees immigrants as useful economically and important culturally and socially. This is the Ronald Reagan view, right? He looked at immigrants and said, okay, these are people with conservative social values. And a strong work ethic, and, they're overwhelmingly likely to be people of faith.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: This I believe is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world.
Cecilia Muñoz: He looked at them and he saw perfect future Republicans. [PETER LAUGHS]
Peter Bergen: And it just, it baffles me that the Republicans, which at one point were in favor of immigration for some of these reasons, you know, have taken such a strong stance.
Cecilia Muñoz: To be honest, Peter, I lay responsibility for this on both sides. I've been at this long enough that I've worked with plenty of Republicans who are pro immigrant and some of them are still in the Congress of the United States and they're unrecognizable now because in a way that people who know better are still kowtowing to Donald Trump, that's happening on this issue among Republicans. But it is also true that the left has been unable for a number of years now to put forward a vision of a fair and orderly system because the enforcement side of that conversation is so uncomfortable. And so we've created a vacuum, which is getting filled with what it's getting filled with.
And one of the elements that vacuum is getting filled with? Hysteria about migrant crime. To be sure, there are criminals among the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in the U.S. And those stories tend to get plenty of media coverage — like the recent murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia, allegedly killed by someone who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The nursing student was killed on the UGA campus while she was out jogging last week. Police say that her alleged killer is from Venezuela and according to federal officials was let go after he was arrested for unlawfully entering the country near El Paso, Texas…
But recent findings by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research show that in fact, immigrants are about 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S.
Julio, the migrant who arrived with his family in Chicago over the summer, knows that a lot of people do believe that migrants are criminals or bad people. It’s the reason he agreed to do an interview and share his story. He’s also concerned about protecting his own family from crime.
Julio: My priority is to find a safety place for them. I like to stay in a place for a long time because that, that, that will provide them emotional security.
Vasquez, the member of the Chicago City Council, also hears these accusations about migrants in Chicago all the time, often from people who were once migrants themselves.
Andre Vasquez: “We don't know if they’re criminals, we don't know what they're doing at night.” It will be the same people who have had those critiques placed on them 10 years ago, bringing it up about new people. And the fact that there's no self awareness of that is so scary to me. As a brown person, I've had people say like, who are you in this neighborhood in that kind of situation to have our own folks and people of color say that about others and not be aware of that same critique. When it's Latinos who are also angry at the Venezuelans that are here, when it's black folk that are angry, it's not lost on me that some of it is fear. Some of it is ignorance. A lot of it's intentional. I've seen poor people fight. And fight amongst themselves while we remain poor and remain without the services we need.
Former President Trump has seized on the divisions the migrant crisis has widened. And he’s promised to do everything in his power to keep people out of the United States. Here’s the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, Stephen Miller, on those plans:
ARCHIVAL Stephen Miller: So you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds and that's where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement. And then you also deploy the military to the southern border. The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border, and to say no one can cross here at all. [APPLAUSE]
Cecilia Muñoz: Fortress America is not a particularly appealing prospect. We're still the shining city on the hill that Ronald Reagan talked about. And we can remain so and be generous, and in fact, I think being generous to migrants is, is one of the ways that we, that allows us to remain so.
Peter Bergen: If there was to be a Republican administration, what are your sort of worst fears?
Cecilia Muñoz: Oh my, so it's hard to overstate what my fears are because they've, they've told us what they intend to do. The Trump administration, as an attempted deterrent to migrants, created a policy through which they separated parents from their children and they did not bother to keep track of where the children were ending up relative to the parents. So some of those families have still not reunited. It is, I don't have words for how terrible that is. We’re talking about a presidential candidate who has announced that he intends to create camps of people; who is interested in reviving the policy of, of separating families and treating people with as much inhumanity as possible; who clearly believes the harsher, the better.
The question is, will this migrant crisis make voters feel more comfortable embracing these kinds of policies, and voting for an administration that has pledged to repeat them? That remains to be seen.
But part of the chaos we’re seeing now is the result of an effort to balance dueling forces: to both deter migrants from coming so the American system doesn’t get overwhelmed, and to smooth their transition to the U.S. when they do come.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Julio is still trying to make a life in Chicago. Recently, the store where he was working cut back his hours, and he’s worried about his future.
And the city of Chicago is still finding its way through this crisis. People are no longer living in police stations, but the city also isn’t letting them stay in shelters long term. Like Denver and New York City, Chicago has begun evicting some people from shelters who’ve been there for months — part of a plan to save money.
In our previous episode, Julio told us about a pretty traumatic journey — from his stepdaughter’s death, to his family’s trip through the treacherous Darien Gap. And he never lost his composure. He’s kept his head up, worked as much as he could. And overall, he and his family? They’re persevering.
[MUSIC SHIFTS, THEN FADES]
Julio: Because we have a positive attitude. Okay. We know that we have to do what, whatever has to be done in order to advance, to move forward. It's hard. I can't tell you that it has been a fairy tale, but I can't complain because if today is a bad day for you, maybe if you turn your head and you take a look at your neighbor, the day for that neighbor is worst.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
As numerous buses started pulling into Chicago from Texas last spring, dropping off migrants in large numbers, Vasquez says he was worried about how all this was going to play out politically,
Andre Vasquez: The first thing I said is we're hosting the Democratic convention, right? And I was like sounding the alarm in a way that made me feel like something was wrong with me and I was the only person seeing it. It's like, there's a train crash coming.
It’s true. The Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago this summer. And while Chicago no longer has migrants camped outside of police stations, thousands of new arrivals could potentially be bussed from the border and dropped in Chicago right as the convention kicks off, and that would not look good for the Democratic Party.
But ultimately, that’s a lot about optics. Vasquez doesn't see this as an insurmountable problem. It's a crisis moment, yes. But that crisis? It’s happened again and again throughout American history.
Andre Vasquez: We know from history all these migrants that are going to be here are going to have kids. And all these kids that are here are going to be citizens. And all those folks are going to get involved politically. And you're going to find some kid from an immigrant family — Guatemala perhaps — who then runs for office and becomes a city council member and the chair of immigrant and refugee rights, or does something greater because they're here in the world and this grand experiment of opportunity. It doesn't feel that way right now, but the arc of history does land there and we've seen it happen. They're going to remain here. They're going to grow roots here like every other generation has. It's going to be the future of this country. We just have to learn to embrace it.
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To learn more about the issues discussed in this episode, we recommend: The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregationby Natalie Moore; The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García by Laura Tillman; and The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham.
All of those titles are available on Audible.
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IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
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