Migration in Context
Research for this section provided by Shrestha Singh, James Cohen, Jennifer Valentine, and Anna White.
Why the sudden influx of migrants in Illinois?
​In April 2022, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced his state was going to start transporting migrants who had been released from federal custody to other states. He said that this was to prevent Texas from shouldering "the burdens imposed by open-border advocates in other parts of the country." Migrants have thus become part of a political game, being sent to largely Democrat-led "welcoming" cities as a way of making a political point.
Since 2022, the State of Texas has bused about 102,000 asylum seekers through private charter buses to Chicago and other large cities at regular intervals. NGOs and local governments along the border have also sent asylum seekers via plane to Chicago without coordination. Since August 2022, Chicago has cared for over 37,000 asylum seekers by providing shelter, food, and medical care.
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What does this have to do with DeKalb?​
In winter 2023-2024, buses began dropping migrants off in the Chicago suburbs, sometimes without alerting local aid organizations or at odd hours of the night in the bitter cold - an inhumane and unsafe practice. ​
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Chicago suburbs have passed ordinances to prohibit charter bus companies from unloading migrants in their towns unless the companies meet conditions like disclosing who will feed and care for these asylum-seekers or getting approval from the city in advance. ​
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In January of 2024, city leaders of DeKalb put forth their own ordinance, arguing that the DeKalb area does not have enough resources to house and care for large groups of people arriving without any warning. The ordinance passed. But widespread public concern about the ordinance being unwelcoming toward migrants led community members to brainstorm how to serve asylum-seekers who may arrive in DeKalb, leading to the creation of DeKalb Migrant Aid.
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Though these ordinances have been framed as concerned with the wellbeing of asylum-seekers, many fear that they are rooted in longstanding practices of excluding immigrants and those we deem "unwanted" from our communities.
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Who is migrating?
While most asylum seekers bused to Illinois are from Venezuela, individuals and families come to our state from all over the world, including countries from Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
Many of these asylum seekers have walked hundreds of miles through multiple countries, crossing jungles, rivers, and rough terrain, and navigating physical danger and threats on their lives, in order to find some safety and opportunity in the US. Their journeys have been arduous and risky, only to be met with more uncertainty upon arriving to the United States.
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Why do people migrate?
People migrate for different reasons, and no two stories are exactly the same. However, experts consider two types of forces that lead people to migrate: push factors (situations in migrants' home countries that cause them to leave) and pull factors (which entice migrants to leave their home countries for opportunity abroad.)
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Push Factors
In interviews with journalists, migrants who recently made their way to the Chicagoland area shared stories of being targeted by corrupt authorities in their home countries, facing gang violence and intimidation, threats of sexual and physical violence from people in positions of power, and more as their reasons for fleeing their home countries. Push factors include:
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Poverty and lack of opportunity
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Many families cannot afford to send children to school (school might be free, but they still have to pay for uniforms and textbooks)
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Some children can’t attend school because their family needs them to work
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Schooling is in Spanish, even for indigenous children
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Lack of employment opportunity, and employment stability
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Community violence
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Violent transnational gangs in countries of origin
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Community violence makes it too dangerous to attend school
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Children may be used as tools for gang initiation rituals
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In El Salvador, for example, 60%of children list crime, gang threats, and insecurity as reasons for leaving
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Climate change and natural disasters
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Ensuing food insecurity
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Damaged infrastructure/economy
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Pull Factors
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Economic opportunity
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More access to employment and higher wage-earning possibility
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Family reunification: Immigration act of 1965
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To be with their parent(s)
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To be with their extended family
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80% of central American minors have relatives in the U.S
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Migrant Stories
Information in this section comes from the Chicago Sun-Times, "After a year of reporting on Chicago’s migrant crisis, here are the stories we don’t get to share"
EDGAR
Edgar Nuñez Aponte, a recent migrant arrival, has an earthy sense of humor that belies the reasons why he came to Chicago. The gaping hole where his four front teeth should be provides a clue.
“They knocked them out,” Aponte, 52, told me when I was out on assignment recently. He motioned as if he were hitting something with the butt of a rifle.
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The Venezuela native then told a highlights-only story of cooking for neighbors in his barrio, authorities seeing that as an anti-Chavista action and then being beaten by police so badly and hospitalized for so long that his family took him for dead.
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I asked him if he wanted to return, and gesturing to his teeth, he replied: “Oh, I could never go back.”​​​​
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LUIS
Luis, a migrant I met at the Near North District police station, was “lucky” like that, as he told me.
Back home, he had a steady remodeling business. As Venezuela spiraled into crisis, that decent business suddenly looked like a potential income stream for a gang looking for a shakedown target.
If he didn’t cough up the money, he was told, they would “chop [him] into pieces.” Dutifully, he reported the gang to police, who, he figures, then told the gang. Soon, desperados on motorbikes were riding through the alleys around his house asking for him.
Luis, 36, spent the next several months at home, in hiding.
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​ANDREA
Andrea Rivas, another migrant I met at the Near North police station, told me she, her partner and their two kids fled Caracas after a neighbor, who happened to be a police officer, began making sexual advances.
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When she rejected him, he started popping off shots at their house.
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I asked if she had considered reporting him. Her glance told me I had no idea what things were like back home.
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“If I had tried to report him, we would have had even more problems,” said Rivas, 26.
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Her partner then ended the conversation before I could go any further.
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Migration-Related Trauma
Before, during, and after migration, migrants may face various kinds of trauma.
Pre-migration, unsafe conditions in one’s homeland may suddenly intensify, leading to a prompt decision to leave. Individuals may have to leave their loved ones, possessions, and their homeland behind, invoking feelings of powerlessness and fear. These unsafe conditions can include violence (war, political, drug-related, gang-related, gender-based, domestic), abuse, oppression, discrimination, poverty, limited access to resources (food, shelter, medical care, clothing).
These same forms of violence, in addition to the stress of uprooting one's life, can also occur during the migration journey, leading to a deep fear of one’s safety (and safety of loved ones) and feelings of powerlessness. Migrants may experience abuse, unsafe conditions, limited access to food and water, human trafficking, physical and emotional exhaustion, and the fear of dying on their journey.​
Once migrants arrive, they may experience poverty, discrimination, violence, stress of adjusting to a new culture, separation from loved ones, fear of deportation, and limited access to medical care and other resources. People may end up experiencing depression, anxiety, psychological distress, or post-traumatic stress.
Keep Learning
PODCASTS/RADIO
"Separating Fact From Politics In The Immigration Debate"
(Rehm, Diane with Molly O’Toole. On My Mind, WAMU, January 26, 2024.)
Peabody Award winning journalist Diane Rehm interviews Pulitzer Prize winning author Molly O’Toole. O’Toole’s new book, “The Route” (slated for publication in 2025), “will take a look at one of the most consequential issues of our time — the mass movement of people around the globe in the face of climate change, civil unrest, and more, with tens of thousands of migrants from Africa and Asia attempting the same treacherous route through South America and Central America each year to reach the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes of gaining entry to America” (mollyotoolejournalist.com).
"Migrants claiming asylum can be allowed into the U.S. Here's how it works."
(Inskeep, Steve, with Muzaffar Chishti. Morning Edition, National Public Radio, May 8 2024.)
NPR host Steve Inskeep interviews Muzaffar Chishti, Senior Fellow at Migration Policy Institute and Director of the MPI office at NYU School of Law. They discuss the legal asylum process, and distinctions between different statuses among migrants in the U.S. According to Chishti, “Anyone on U.S. soil who expresses a fear of returning to their country on the basis of five protected classifications of U.N. protocol [race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and membership in a particular social group], we have the obligation to let them in to pursue their asylum applications,” (npr.org).​
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BOOKS
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (Jonathan Blitzer, 2024).
An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer. Named a Best Book of 2024 (So Far) by New York Times. This vast and unremitting [migration] crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.
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The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move (Sonia Shah, 2020).
A prize-winning journalist upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration through science, history, and reporting--predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, catapulting us into the highest reaches of the Himalayan mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis--it is the solution.
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In this powerful and personal narrative, a distinguished immigration lawyer guides us through the trials and terrors of modern immigration law. Beginning in a day in the life of an undocumented immigrant, Sepulveda proceedes through a processing intake and a heartwrenching court hearing. He takes us to a Texas border detention center where mothers and childen are essentially imprisoned, then on to New York’s JFK airport during the weekend of Trump’s infamous travel ban, where Sepulveda joined many other attorneys to provide pro bono legal counsel for passengers endangered with deportation.
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IMAGES/VIDEO
“The Darién Gap is an imposing obstacle on one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. The remote, roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama consists of more than sixty miles of dense rain forest, steep mountains, and vast swamps. It is the only overland path connecting Central and South America. Over the past few years, it has become a leading transit point for migrants in search of work and safety in the United States, as authorities have cracked down on other routes by air and sea” (cfr.org).
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In a series of 15 photographs, AP journalists capture scenes of families and individuals, journeying toward and across the southern U.S. border. Locations include the Darién Gap (between Colombia and Panama); American border walls; south central Mexico; the Rio Grande and Rio Bravo rivers; and southern California.​​
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"What does it take to be a refugee?" (TEDxSurrey, April 5, 2023.)
A refugee is someone who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. They are innocent people who are being stripped of their freedom and safety, as the rest of the world turns its back, says 17-year-old refugee advocate Muhaddisa Sarwari. In this eye-opening talk, she shares the stories of navigating a better life with resilience and hope, and the importance of fighting the prejudice against immigrants and refugees. Expressed through witty anecdotes and passionate storytelling, this powerful talk will challenge your view on refugees. ​
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At the end of 2023, the number of migrants crossing into the United States reached a record high. But before the global population of migrants reaches the U.S. border, many travel more than 1,500 miles through Mexico. With producers Sam Weber and Christine Romo, Amna Nawaz reports on the surge in migration at Mexico's southern border.
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​This webinar is part of a series about the impact of the 2024 election on immigration. It covers important terminology, our rights when protesting, and the power we wield to effect change.
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