XENOPHOBIA IN WOODLAWN?

Chicago's rookie mayor Lori Lightfoot would like money from Springfield or Washington or a magic helicopter to provide shelter for the illegal immigrants being sent by governors, Republican and Democrat alike, to sanctuary cities run by Democrats.

Declaring yourself a sanctuary city costs nothing, as long as you have a national government that is protecting its borders. Let the national government change its policies, and all of a sudden, accusing state governors who are bearing the brunt of the illegal crossings as "racist" doesn't do anything for the material or moral condition of the people who request transportation to Chicago.

It gets more interesting.  Decades of flight of productive people of all callings, colors, and creeds from Illinois, including Chicago, mean there are idle public buildings including schools that might serve as temporary shelter until the new arrivals connect with their local sponsors.

Not without asking the current neighbors first.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot halted plans on [6 January] to turn a shuttered school in Woodlawn into a shelter for immigrants bused to Chicago amid an uproar that has roiled the race for 20th Ward alderperson and exacerbated tensions between Black and Latino Chicagoans.

The mayor’s office told WTTW News that officials “have not determined a firm date on when this space will open for shelter” but remains “committed to carefully balancing the needs of both our residents and new arrivals.”

Since Aug. 31, 2022, a total of 3,854 immigrants have been bused to Chicago from Texas, with an additional 1,400 immigrants coming from other states, officials said. Since then, the city has set up 11 emergency shelters across the city. Lightfoot has asked state officials to send $54 million in emergency funding to the city to care for the immigrants.

The announcement came three days after Lightfoot defended her plan to open a shelter for some of the 1,500 immigrants in the city’s care at the former Wadsworth Elementary School near 64th Street and University Avenue

The argument the residents raise doesn't sink to the level of "drug dealers, rapists, and a few good people" although it suggests that affirming diversity is not top of mind in Woodlawn.  Here's how Kira Davis reported for Red State.

The community of Woodlawn is majority black, and residents are saying their community is already overwhelmed with issues ranging from crime to being flooded with illegal drugs. They are calling for Mayor Lori Lightfoot to relocate the illegal immigrants, most of whom are presumed to be from South America, to Latino-majority areas of the city. In particular, Little Village, which is a largely Mexican community.

Public television confirms.

Those concerns boiled over at a rally that took place outside the school on [5 January], where neighbors of the school said the immigrants should be sheltered in a predominately Latino neighborhood, not in Woodlawn, where the majority of residents are Black.

That rally was organized by Jennifer Maddox, who is running against Ald. Jeanette Taylor to represent the 20th Ward on the Chicago City Council.

Taylor said her office will host a community meeting about the proposal at 6 p.m. [5 January] at the Apostolic Church of God, 6320 S. Dorchester Ave. Taylor also said her office will meet privately on [9 January] with members of the Chicago Police Department to develop a safety and security plan around the proposed shelter.

Woodlawn residents are not anti-immigrant, but angry that Lightfoot’s administration decided to open a shelter in a shuttered school without consulting them or developing a plan to ensure the safety of everyone in the area, Taylor said.

“The administration dropped the ball,” Taylor said, calling the mayor’s attempts to communicate with Woodlawn residents and her office “half ass.”

“We asked them to do this with us and not to us,” Taylor said. “We need sanctuary for all, not some.”

Maddox, a former Chicago police officer honored for her work to create after school programs, said she blamed both Taylor and Lightfoot for the conflagration.

“I’m not against the migrants, but for the community,” Maddox said, adding that she was concerned that the immigrants would face a language barrier and experience “culture shock.”

It is mayoral and aldermanic election season in Chicago, and the attack ads are in the spirit of that "half ass." Woodlawn residents, however, appear to have rediscovered "consent of the governed".

Many of those who expressed anti-immigrant sentiment at the rally were speaking “out of emotion” after having been “backed against the wall,” Maddox said.

Maddox said that many people resented the fact that city officials have spent $1.5 million to renovate the school, even as the mayor’s office denied officials planned to use it as a temporary shelter for immigrants beginning in October.

“This is not a dictatorship,” Maddox said, calling statements from representatives of the mayor that the shelter would open regardless of their concerns at a Dec. 28 community meeting “a slap in the face.”

Taylor should have stopped the work to transform the school into a shelter, or at least informed the community, Maddox said.

“Where is the transparency?” Maddox said.

Taylor said she was prepared to “outraise and out organize” Maddox and defeat her for the second time in a row to win reelection, but acknowledged that the controversy would hurt her campaign.

“I’m not going to be the fall guy,” Taylor said.

After two years of going along with the mayor's dictatorial corona ukases, is anybody surprised that she continues to act like a dictator?  If you doubted, dear reader, that there was a tribal element to Chicago's politics, let the lakefront liberals producing public television stories present evidence.

Representatives of the mayor did not respond to a question from WTTW News about whether Lightfoot was concerned about rising tensions between Black and Latino residents as a result of her proposal to transform a closed Chicago Public Schools building in a primarily Black neighborhood into a shelter for immigrants who came to America seeking asylum.

Taylor said the mayor is fully responsible for the racial tension now engulfing her community, and urged residents to focus their ire on Lightfoot and her administration, rather than each other.

“We can’t allow this situation to divide us,” Taylor said. “It shouldn't be Black against Brown. It should be all of us against the administration.”

That's unlikely to turn out well. "Live by your tribal identity, die by your tribal identity. That's not exactly buying into America, or giving mainstream America reason to buy into your aspirations."  Unfortunately, as I noted more recently, there isn't enough of a libertarian populist presence, of any partisan affiliation, to offer the residents of Woodlawn or Pilsen or any of the other ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Village or Wrigleyville a vision other than tribal politics.

Let us give thanks, though, that the sort of people who might be hoping that an influx of illegal immigrants to implement a Cloward-Piven strategy comes a cropper, because urban Democrats have twigged to the reality that the money isn't even there for a limited Cloward-Piven giveaway to immigrants.  Now if Republicans would stop claiming that Democrats are importing future Democrat-voting-welfare-dependents in the form of illegal immigrants to subsequently grant citizen status.

The squabbling among Democrats at various levels of local, state, and national government is amusing.  "NYC, Chicago Mayors Politely Ask Democratic Governor to Stop Busing Asylum Seekers to Their Cities."  Pajamas Media style populists, unsurprisingly, are pointing to the different style of complaint when the new arrivals are coming from Colorado, governed by a Democrat (who was sensible enough to opt out of the corona tyranny before the rest of his conference caught on) as opposed to being bused from Florida or Texas, where the basest insults and motive-questioning are in order.

Colorado’s Democrat Gov. Jared Polis has also been busing asylum seekers to New York City and Chicago to relieve the strain on his state services.

As you might expect, that went over like a lead balloon, and on Saturday, Lightfoot and Adams sent a very polite letter to Polis asking him sweetly to cease and desist.

“We respectfully demand that you cease and desist sending migrants to New York City and Chicago,” Adams and Lightfoot wrote in a letter to Polis. “Since December of 2022, Chicago and New York City have received hundreds of individuals from Colorado.”

Colorado's transportation program did catch the mayors of New York and Chicago on the back foot.  "After first jeopardizing the city’s ability to respond, the unfolding humanitarian crisis now threatens to sour Colorado’s relationships with New York City and Chicago, whose leaders have called for the busing of immigrants from Denver to their doorsteps to end." Their letter includes an observation worthy of Frederic Bastiat. “It is apparent that the influx of asylum seekers has provoked consternation amongst states. Although we share the concerns of accommodating the flood of asylum seekers, overburdening other cities is not the solution.”  Pajamas Media's Rick Moran concludes, "If those two big city mayors — and a popular Democratic governor like Polis — can’t get Biden to pay attention, no one can."

Are we at the stage of national Democrats and their palace guard media telling us "Nobody has ever proposed stopping the construction of the border wall"?