Newly sworn-in Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson faces the unenviable tasks of reducing the city’s soaring crime, solving widespread homelessness and restoring decaying schools overcrowded with underperforming pupils.
The Chicago Police department reported that the 2021 homicide total hit 800, a 25-year high. An estimated 66,000 residents are homeless; Chicago in the steamy summer and frigid winter makes sleeping on city streets tough. Exacerbated by the draconic COVID-19 school closures, thousands of students don’t have basic competence in reading, science or math. Many are chronically truant and face grim futures.
Crime, homelessness and failing schools are problems that have plagued Chicago for years. But progressive Johnson inherits from outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot a challenge that outrages his black voter base: the incoming tide of illegal immigrants and disgust with Chicago providing aliens with services despite a projected $128 million budget deficit.
Since August 2022, more than 8,000 migrants have moved into Chicago, according to NBC Chicago. Arrivals into the city have increased recently, with many illegal immigrants sleeping on police station floors. Chicago is out of space, and has no place to house the aliens. Lightfoot declared a city-wide emergency, but promised to do “everything it can to respond to the urgency of this matter.” The former mayor misdirected her ire at Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott when, in fact, the root cause of Chicago’s illegal immigrant crisis is President Biden who opened the Southwest border to all comers more than two years ago.
Johnson inherits the migrant mess and should brace himself for its indefinite continuance. Chicago and the state of Illinois are sanctuaries. In 2019, Gov. J. P. Pritzker (D) expanded the original sanctuary provisions that his predecessor Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) legalized when, in 2017, he signed the Illinois Trust Act. Pritzker signed three bills that ban alien detention centers, prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE, and limit immigration enforcement at public schools and universities, libraries, hospitals and courthouses. As long as Texas or other states send migrants to Illinois, Pritzker is fine with it. Illinois, he said, will care for them, a policy at odds with the state’s largest block of black voters in Chicago.
Black voters overwhelmingly backed Johnson and are the principal reason he won the election. Although the final vote margin was narrow, 51-49 over rival Paul Vallas, data from the Chicago Board of Elections show that Johnson won City Hall because of strong black voter support. He won all 17 black wards and 76 percent of the overall black vote.
On May 10, however, five days before Johnson was sworn in, black Chicago resident citizens filed a lawsuit to prevent migrants from occupying a southside neighborhood school. In a press conference at which municipal officials set up road blocks to minimize attendance, the residents detailed their objections. One said the migrant placements were an effort to change their black community; another said that he was placed on a city housing wait list, but was told that migrants had priority. A third critic, Brian Mullins, who identified as a “non-immigrant foundational black American,” said that: “We’re fighting for our equity.” He elaborated: “Chicago has a $60 billion budget. We want 30 percent of that budget to be put in services and employment of our specific [black] community.” Of Chicago’s 2.7 million population, 30 percent is African-American.
Chicago’s blacks vote 96 percent Democrat, but Mullins warned that a 10 percent shift could sway future elections. Had that shift occurred in the Johnson race, he would have been defeated. The continued displacement of black Americans has reduced their ability to get well-paid jobs or afford rising rents, factors that could motivate them to abandon the Democratic party they’ve supported for generations.
Mullins, perhaps aware that immigrants have displaced blacks as the largest minority population in Los Angeles and New York, summed up his view of the deleterious effect that Biden’s open borders has on black Americans: “Every time immigrants come into our country, we get stamped into the quicksand harder. We stay at the bottom and we’re just saying, ‘Get off of us, let us breathe… stop putting other people’s needs in front of us.’”
Johnson is skating on thin ice with his most important and powerful base. Blacks can vote while migrants, at least legally, can’t. In the next four years, Johnson should do more to correct the valid concerns of black communities in Chicago, and spend less time and money advocating for illegal aliens.