With Chicago’s migrant crisis worsening, Biden should step up

This editorial board for months now has been critical of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s ham-fisted handling of the city’s migrant crisis.

But as scores of asylum seekers from the country’s southern border continue to be crammed aboard buses and chartered aircraft by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and callously shipped to Chicago and other major cities with Democratic leadership, it’s also clear that its time for President Joe Biden to get off the sidelines and fully address the problem on a national level.

“We have reached a critical point in this mission absent real, significant intervention immediately,” said Johnson who was joined by New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston in a call with Biden administration officials on the matter last week.

“Our local economies are not designed to respond to this kind of crisis,” Johnson said. “This is not something that should break our country.”

But that’s just what could happen. And if not nationwide, certainly the municipal budgets of Chicago, Denver, New York and other northern cities are at risk.

Disburse migrants nationwide

Johnson, Adams and Johnston want more federal government funding sent to cities to better provide shelter and other assistance to the migrants.

“We cannot continue to do the federal government’s job,” Adams said. “We have spoken to FEMA and other federal officials who have expressed concern about the border surge, but not offered additional help.”

One request from the mayors may be happening already: fast-tracking federal work authorizations that would allow asylum seekers to legally get jobs.

The mayors also want the Biden administration to create a federally-run system to fairly disburse migrants to locations across the country, ending ‘Air Abbott’ and his politically motivated transport policies that have dropped off migrants in cities with no advance warning.

Indeed, Abbott’s behavior is so egregious that when Chicago and New York began a clampdown in recent weeks on the buses bringing in the migrants, the Texas governor then sent the vehicles to places such as Rockford and Jersey City, locales with easy transit access to the Windy City and the Big Apple.

“It seems quite clear the bus operators are finding a way to thwart the requirements of the [New York City] executive order by dropping migrants at the train station in Secaucus and having them continue to their final destination,” Secaucus, New Jersey Mayor Michael Gonnelli said in a statement Monday.

Meanwhile, Abbott isn’t sending his buses and planes to St. Louis, a city that is actively courting migrants and asylum seekers in a bid to turn back decades of population loss and to bring potential new workers into the region.

All of this is a good reason for the federal government — not Abbott — to handle migrant relocation.

“We need action and we need it now,” Adams said. “We are calling for the federal declaration of emergency, financial support and a national resettlement strategy.”

Leadership at a critical time

Admittedly, we don’t like the possibility of the federal government handing the Johnson administration a big pot of cash to handle the migrant situation. Over 15,000 migrants and asylum seekers have landed in Chicago since August 2022, but the city has burned through $300 million in an attempt to get its arms around the issue.

That pencils out to about $20,000 per person, which is a load of money for plans like migrant tent camps on contaminated land.

And wait: There’s more. As the Sun-Times reported last week, Johnson wants to use $95 million in COVID-19 relief funds to pay for migrant shelter construction.

We’d rather see any new money from the feds go the governor’s office or the appropriate regional branches of the federal government, or at least give them a huge say in how the money is spent.

We’ve said the migrant issue is a defining moment for the Johnson administration. But the same holds true for Biden, who faces reelection this year.

It’s time for the president to be the adult in the room and use the power of his office to handle this problem. Yes, Chicago stands to benefit. But the president does too, by showing leadership and skill in a crucial election year.

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