Chicagoans have stepped up for our new neighbors

despite everything

Here is a post about good deeds, accompanied by good songs, for a terrible gray sodden week in a dubious national season. Let’s grab some good feelings where we can.

You see this pile of beautiful knitted hats here? They’re all different, and soft, and cozy. And they were all made by a friend of a friend and shipped from another state. A complete stranger to Chicago who just wanted to help keep some of our newest residents warm.

The newest residents, that is, who arrive by bus from Texas with no hat, or coat, or proper shoes. The ones who get dropped off unannounced at a closed Kankakee gas station at 4 in the morning and told they’re in Chicago, and then, with no other apparent alternative, begin walking on the highway in flip flops. The ones dropped off on random suburban street corners close to nothing, at all hours of the day and night, or at suburban train stations and, no doubt bafflingly to the migrants, popped onto commuter trains headed downtown. Despite the rules imposed by the city and the suburbs in an attempt to keep people from being dumped anywhere at any time, the sadists in Texas continue to send busloads of migrants and drop them willy nilly around the city (where “city” includes Kankakee and Rockford), some of them sick and all of them unprepared. The sadists in Texas do this despite the longest stretch of below zero temperatures here in 30 years.

The illness, suffering, and death of these people means literally nothing to Governor Greg Abbott—not if they’re children, not if they’re babies. Nothing at all. He recently said that Texas officials are doing all they can to secure the border, stopping short of shooting migrants, because if they did that, “the Biden administration would charge them with murder.” Abbott made these clarifying remarks after 2 children and their mother drowned last week in the Rio Grande with its razor-wired buoys with blades, as the Texas Military Department [the who what now?] prevented federal border patrol agents from answering a distress call.

I could go on. But this post is not about that wicked man and the flunkies who implement his sick whims. This post is the promised report about what Chicagoans have been doing—for months, for well over a year now—to help our new arrivals, in the face of utter randomness and persistent inhumanity.

Rounding up and writing down the nice things Chicagoans have done for the arriving migrants has been really difficult. It’s taken me months. I keep trying and failing. Not because it’s hard to find these things, but because there has been so much. It’s positively mind boggling. The work has grown and changed along with the changing needs of the migrants. It’s been an avalanche of kindness.

I started out trying to capture in a spreadsheet just what was happening in my own neighborhood so that I could figure out how my church could be involved in helping. This quickly proved to be ungainly, as so many disparate individuals and groups were doing too much to track. Every time I thought I finally had it all, I heard of a new informal alliance of folks who were doing other quite astonishing things. You see my problem. All this kindness doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet.

We’re not talking about city programs here, or even the work of Chicago’s abundant, amazing nonprofits that pick up so many folks who fall through the cracks. We’re talking about just random regular citizens, Chicagoans who wish to help out people who need help, folks who simply care. We’re talking about your neighbors. Maybe we’re talking about you.

Old neighbors helping new neighbors. This is how the people who work with them regard the waves of arriving migrants: our new neighbors. For this is what they are.

And they’re going to make great Chicagoans, these new neighbors. They’re badass, determined survivors who undertook a 3000 mile journey through 8 countries, dealing with jungles and robbers, mostly on foot, to get someplace where they could simply work and raise families in safety and peace. You and I can’t imagine what these people have been through.

If you’re on the fence about our new neighbors, consider how much good that 10,000 new riders, say, will do for the CTA, still trying to pull itself out of its post-covid slump. CPS post-closings and post-covid has hemorrhaged students: here are a bunch of new ones. And if the city can establish structures to help newest arrivals in any sort of organized systematic way, this will go a long way toward developing a better long term infrastructure and strategy for our homeless and marginalized residents—something that should have been accomplished years ago.

They’re going to make outstanding contributions here, like every other wave of migrants before them. Immigrants have given Chicago its unique character as long as there’s been Chicago.

I think the helpers have always known that. Yet they’ve been helping not for transactional reasons, but just because they see fellow human beings in need. It’s pretty simple.

Much of the work started organically as people arriving by the hundreds every day had nowhere to go and ended up at police stations. Locals in the vicinity of the stations began trying to help out, as indoors filled up and migrants had to sleep outdoors. This was truly a train wreck but for almost every police station there was a volunteer group that tried to meet the needs of the newcomers. Via social media that started with a few people and grew into the hundreds, everything was organized—from clothing and outerwear to tents and sleeping bags to meals, for almost every person, almost every day, for months and months.

Groups of neighbors made meals in large church kitchens for dozens of people in the police stations, swapping off days of the week. The food was good—so good, in fact, that migrants who had been offered shelter space and left the police stations frequently returned because the food was better. (Ooops.)

Some people made their homes into donation hubs, gathering everything from clothes to diapers and wipes to books, toys, and boots, to housewares, linens, and furniture. Can you imagine saying to your entire network, your whole neighborhood, in repeated public announcements: Come, bring all the things you want to donate for migrants to my house, and I will get them where they need to go. Can you imagine the amount of donations that were collected and stored in the homes of some of your neighbors? Then these same people took the coats, socks, hand warmers, tents, and tarps directly to migrants at police stations. And when migrants were moved from station to shelter as spaces opened up, and a whole new group arrived, all the tents and tarps and sleeping bags had to be washed, and volunteers did that too. Some laundromats let volunteers wash these things for free.

If people who used their homes as donation hubs weren’t bringing things to migrants, they were bringing migrants to their homes to outfit them with what they needed. And of course, different things are needed at different parts of this journey. These donation collectors could meet needs of the newest arrivals as well as families who had been here long enough to be setting up an apartment of their own, and if they didn’t have what was needed they sourced things through their networks.

Neighborhood leaders managed text groups that could alert dozens, or hundreds, of volunteers, to immediate needs: an unexpected group of people arriving at a certain place in need of dinner at a certain time. Who can do this? Who has a car to take migrants to shower at the park district? Who can put together toiletry kits for 10 people who just arrived? Who can pick up a prescription? Boom. Done.

As migrant kids started school, baffled families needed help navigating this process. There were people who got kids registered, walked kids to school, tutored and supervised after school care, and tried to figure out how to teach these kids English in an underfunded and overstretched school district. This is ongoing work. There are people who take migrants to the grocery store, to legal help, and to the doctor.

A neighborhood center that has a lot of kids programming offered free child care for children who are too young for school, and after care, soccer, art, and ESL for school aged kids. Churches offered food pantries, hot meals, free stores, and temporary housing until migrants were able to get into shelters. Housing families by the hundreds.

Then there are people who had rooms in their homes, or small apartments that individuals or a little family could stay in. They just thought about it, prayed about it, and said, Sure, I can house some folks. And they did. This is happening quietly and unspectacularly and imperatively all over the city.

These are mostly the under-the-radar projects and actions not spotlighted by media. You almost have to know someone who is doing this stuff to even know it is happening at all, this quiet buzz of activity. But on top of this constant hum of unknown neighbors helping neighbors, there is also all the work you can read or hear about in our local media, and that’s been pretty spectacular too: so many Thanksgiving dinners, so many Christmas toy drives, housing help, advocacy for expedited work permits, a police officer who collected bilingual children’s books, critical mobile medical teams, restaurateurs who work every day to end hunger in our city, and people who are working hard to help keep our city united as we deal with the stress fractures of a trauma no one asked for.

Then there’s you. You’ve probably gathered up scarves you haven’t been wearing, or boots your kids outgrew, or that pair of gloves that no one is sure whose it is but it’s in good shape and kicking around the closet. You may have volunteered at a food pantry. Maybe you bought 50 toothbrushes. You knitted a bunch of hats because you love to knit. You think, it’s nothing really. But is it nothing?

In the face of severe, determined inhumanity in Texas, and confused handwringing inadequacy at City Hall, the people of Chicago have done and continue to do so much though actions large and small. All of these actions threaded together cannot possibly fix everything. But all of them together have changed our city in quiet, local ways, with fresh infusions of dignity, morality, and justice emanating into every neighborhood. Choosing love and service and uplifting one another has always been and will always be the best choice for every community. This work has created a magnificent fabric that is just the newest part of our Chicago tapestry, woven with love. George Eliot said in the wonderful last line of Middlemarch, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.” And it is true: the goodness we offer to our neighbors—old, new, in no need and in great need—redounds upon us and magnifies goodness in our communities, for all of us.

If we’re going to be getting unanticipated, crisis-level migrant waves here in Chicago, I wouldn’t want it to be happening with anybody but you all. Bravo, Chicagoans. Well done, neighbors.