Welcoming city: Immigration not a radioactive issue in chill Chicago

Immigration has always shaped Chicago’s neighbourhoods, its expansion, and its culture.

Immigrants have stabilised the city’s population, allowing it to maintain slow growth in recent years. Foreign-born workers are integral to the local economy, particularly in the construction, manufacturing, and service industries.

Chicago politicians brag about their immigrant backgrounds, as in the Irish American Daleys, and it is not uncommon to see signs in English, Spanish, and Polish on downtown buildings.

“Chicago has been very chill about immigration,” said Rob Paral, a demographer at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois Chicago. “It’s not a radioactive issue here.”

As the Trump administration announced this week that it had begun a crackdown on illegal immigration in the city, elected officials and local advocacy groups loudly pushed back, citing Chicago’s history as a city that has welcomed immigrants.

More than 500,000 Chicagoans were born outside the US.

Chicago’s population of 2.7 million is roughly split in thirds among white residents, Black residents, and Latino residents, plus a small but growing number of Asian residents.

According to the American Community Survey for 2023, 560,000 of Chicago’s residents are foreign-born, the majority of whom have legal status in the US. In the city, at least 150,000 people are in the US without legal status, encompassing about 8% of Chicago households, according to Paral’s research.

In the 19th century, immigrants came from Europe to Chicago in waves, seeking work at meatpacking plants, railroads, and factories.

The largest group of immigrants in Chicago today is from Mexico, followed by China, India, the Philippines, and Poland, according to census data. The 1980s in particular saw a rush of arrivals from Mexico.

Mexican-born Chicagoans have lived and built businesses for generations in neighbourhoods including Pilsen and Little Village, and more recently, in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side, and Brighton Park and Gage Park on the Southwest Side.

More than 8,00,000 Chicagoans in the 2020 census identified as Hispanic or Latino.

Asian Americans, a growing population in Chicago, are concentrated in Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Chinatown, as well as the Uptown neighbourhood on the North Side.

More than 30,000 Ukrainians have also flooded into Chicago in recent years to escape their war-scarred country, with some families choosing to stay in the city and others eventually moving to nearby suburbs with heavy Eastern European populations.

Chicago has restricted local officials from helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Laws in Chicago tend to be protective of immigrants’ rights. Chicago is known as a sanctuary city for its laws that prevent local officials from helping federal immigration agents enforce immigration law.

In 2012, under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago passed a new Welcoming City Ordinance that prevents police officers from detaining people solely on the belief that they are in the country illegally.

Mayor Brandon Johnson has repeatedly affirmed Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city.

A recent surge of migrants strained Chicago.

Occasionally, tensions over immigration have risen in Chicago.

In 2023, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending buses of asylum-seekers from Central and South America to Chicago, saying that his own state was unfairly overwhelmed by people crossing the border, Chicago was inundated with people who had nowhere to stay. Hundreds were sleeping in tents on sidewalks in winter and on floors inside police stations, and the cost of the effort to feed and house the migrants strained city resources.

While the buses have long stopped arriving, many Chicagoans, including Latinos, have objected to the sudden influx of migrants and worried that their integration into the city would be difficult.

The New York Times