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Greg Abbott isn’t someone most Chicagoans look upon with fondness. And for good reason. Leave aside the nasty politics for a moment, though, and in a key respect Abbott has done Chicago and the country a favor.
The Texas governor has sowed chaos in our local politics by dispatching multiple busloads of migrants to Chicago with little notice and absurdly minimal consultation with authorities here. His motives are less than pure, that’s for sure. But he has effectively called the bluff of local politicians on their repeated statements of welcome to migrants.
That part of the strategy has worked, perhaps even better than Abbott imagined. The influx of migrants from Venezuela and elsewhere has exposed underlying divisions within the city about Chicago’s racial makeup and over which communities should bear our “sanctuary city” burdens.
He’s forced much of blue-state America to confront the country’s immigration crisis in the most direct way possible — in a way that Texas and other border states have had no choice but to face for decades.
Chicago’s incompetent efforts to effectively care for the migrants bused here have been well-documented. Ultimately, though, as Mayor Brandon Johnson, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle have repeatedly said, the solutions to these issues lie not in Chicago or New York, but in Washington. And that’s where Abbott’s gambit, cynical though it’s been, has helped focus the minds of lawmakers at last on an issue long demagogued and deferred.
What raises the chances for progress this time is a dramatic change in the political calculations, particularly for Democrats.
For many years, Democrats have stood for extraordinarily liberal policies toward immigration, even to the point where in the early stages of the 2020 presidential primary race the majority of candidates advocated no longer treating illegal entry into the U.S. as a federal crime, effectively endorsing an open-borders policy, or something very close.
At the time, Democrats hoped that in the face of the Trump administration’s immigration excesses — Muslim bans, separating children from their parents, etc. — the contrast would appeal to Latino voters. Polls show that it clearly hasn’t, and Democrats are beginning to realize that.
On the GOP side, once Donald Trump left the White House, immigration has worked well as a wedge issue, giving the party less incentive to find a solution. Republicans continue to stick fast to positions they know are non-starters with Democrats, such as giving the president the authority to halt all asylum claims on the southern border.
It’s quite possible Republican lawmakers won’t enter into good-faith negotiations now that lawmakers on both sides acknowledge the border is at a crisis point, seeking instead to retain the issue for the 2024 election. That would be a terrible mistake.
Why? Immigration has bedeviled the country for decades. It’s extremely rare when that issue’s undergirding politics align in such a way to make real progress possible. We’re at such a point now.
The country’s process of administering asylum claims, which both parties now allow is badly broken, is at the heart of the latest debates. People of good will should be able to address this. Democrats call for more investment to beef up and streamline the system and process claims far more quickly than is currently happening. As it is, migrants can and do spend years in the country waiting for final word on asylum.
Republicans say the system is being abused and that newcomers are traveling across many countries and even continents to get here. They say that few other countries in the world are as liberal as the U.S. on asylum. They want a crackdown on those abuses and they have a point.
What should not be lost in the strong emotions surrounding this issue is that asylum is an American value, as Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who has labored on this cause for over two decades, said on the floor a few days ago. This country since its founding has been a refuge for people facing starvation, war and even pogroms. There have been shameful periods where the U.S. failed to live up to its values — for example, in denying refuge to Jews in the lead-up to World War II. But the values remained, nonetheless.
We need to fix the asylum process, not scrap it. And, with Trump seeking a return to the White House, giving the executive branch unfettered power on asylum would be a mistake.
Still to be determined, too, is the fate of the so-called Dreamers, people brought to the U.S. as children who’ve lived and worked here for decades. This page in the past has called for a practical solution to give Dreamers a path to citizenship. That should have been solved years ago. Let’s do so now.
And we need to encourage more legal migration other than through the asylum process, especially of immigrants with desirable skills. There’s no shortage of business voices, many of whom generally align with Republicans on other issues, who say they need workers and aren’t attracting enough citizens or legal residents to do the jobs. Most other developed, desirable countries align their immigration policies with what their nation needs the most.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
The GOP should stop holding critical and time-sensitive aid to Ukraine hostage to stronger border security and immigration limits. Helping Ukraine fend off the attacks from Putin’s Russia — Kyiv has been under renewed missile attacks in recent days — is overwhelmingly in the U.S. interest. Assertions that we shouldn’t be fighting Putin until we secure our border are intellectually dishonest.
Democrats, including President Joe Biden who seems to realize the border chaos significantly weakens his reelection chances, have plenty of motivation to strike a deal without ham-handed stratagems to gain leverage such as the Ukraine ploy.
So at long last, this dysfunctional Congress, which if it ended today would be remembered mainly for the majority party in the House toppling its own speaker and taking three weeks to select a replacement, has a chance to rewrite its story in a more favorable light.
Democrats and Republicans, improbably, have an opportunity to show they can work in good faith on a major issue that the public badly wants addressed.
Do it.
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