Sometimes the best way to understand why something is going wrong is to look at what’s going right. The asylum seekers from the border aren’t the only outsiders in town. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them. “We have at least 30,000 Ukrainian refugees in the city of Chicago, and no one has even noticed,” Johnson told me in a recent interview.
According to New York officials, of about 30,000 Ukrainians who resettled there, very few ended up in shelters. By contrast, the city has scrambled to open nearly 200 emergency shelters to house asylees from the southwest border.
What ensured the quiet assimilation of displaced Ukrainians? Why has the arrival of asylum seekers from Latin America been so different? And why have some cities managed to weather the so-called crisis without any outcry or political backlash? In interviews with mayors, other municipal officials, nonprofit leaders, and immigration lawyers in several states, I pieced together an answer stemming from two major differences in federal policy. First, the Biden administration admitted the Ukrainians under terms that allowed them to work right away. Second, the feds had a plan for where to place these newcomers. It included coordination with local governments, individual sponsors, and civil-society groups. The Biden administration did not leave Ukrainian newcomers vulnerable to the whims of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who since April 2022 has transported 37,800 migrants to New York City, 31,400 to Chicago, and thousands more to other blue cities—in a successful bid to push the immigration debate rightward and advance the idea that immigrants are a burden on native-born people.
To call this moment a “migrant crisis” is to let elected federal officials off the hook. But a “crisis of politicians kicking the problem down the road until opportunists set it on fire” is hard to fit into a tweet, so we’ll have to make do.
Getting 30k people that largely have passports and money is totally different than 30k people arriving with nothing.
I don’t see how we’re going to complain about these migrants being broke when we’re simultaneously forbidding them from seeking legal employment. As for the passport issue, it’s not like it’s the migrants fault they’re fleeing areas with dysfunctional governments with disorganized paperwork. With the surveillance technology and level of control we have over our own territory we should be able to find some way to address whatever reasonable security concerns officials might have.
Work authorization would help, but it’s not a silver bullet. These migrants need more aid, and are more economic in nature, as they’ve generally spent a month+ traveling through Mexico in a somewhat constant state of dehydration and starvation. Comparing them to people who mostly had established lives and had to grab what they could to flee a war isn’t really a fair comparison.
