Chicago: Lori Lightfoot Primary Challengers Propose Voting Rights for Illegal Immigrants

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Neil Munro

Two of the several Democrats racing for the mayorship of Chicago are promising to help give illegal migrants the right to vote in some city elections and to sit on advisory boards.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is the Democratic incumbent. She faces a primary on February 28 and a likely run-off on April 4 in a crime-ridden city where the inflowing Latino population is now greater than the declining black population.

She is being challenged by several candidates, including Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a black Democrat who is backed by the teachers’ union. Johnson released his “Plan for Sanctuary and Immigrant Justice” on Tuesday, which says:

[I will] Work with [Democratic] Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield to pass legislation that will allow all parents and taxpayers to vote in school board elections, regardless of citizenship status.

“There’s enough for everyone in this city,” Johnson said on February 13:

No one has to lose at the expense of someone else winning — we are disrupting that mindset … It’s not about a single pie. It’s about making multiple pies. Whatever it is, there’s gonna be enough for everybody.

Lightfoot’s main threat comes from Mexico-born Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who is now a member of Congress. He is likely to draw a huge share of the Latino population, which now comprises about 20 percent of the voters — although 30 percent of the population.

His campaign document also promises to get illegal migrants onto the city’s voting rolls: “Ensure non-citizen taxpayers and undocumented parents can vote in local school board elections as they do in their local school council.”

Garcia is also offering to welcome new migrants to the city with funding, housing, and protections from federal enforcement agencies: “All services and benefits provided by the city will be available to all Chicagoans, regardless of immigration status,”m his plan says.

Bloomberg reported on February 9:

“I do expect Chuy to get probably a majority of the Latino vote,” said Dick Simpson, a former alderman and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has endorsed Lightfoot for reelection.

….

“Racial voting will matter,” Simpson said. “The Black vote will be so split. The Latino vote will be somewhat smaller and go mostly to Chuy, so the White vote could be the deciding vote.”

The last Republican Mayor of Chicago left office in 1931.

Crime is by far the top issue in the mayoral race.

But amid the murders and carjackings, however, immigration is boiling upwards as the city government provides free housing and aid to foreign migrants who are searching for the jobs needed by the city’s young men, including blacks.

A January 31-Feb. 3 poll showed that 56 percent of locals oppose the bussing of migrants into Chicago. A majority of blacks and whites oppose the bussing — and just 51 percent of local Hispanics support the continued inflow.

This media-muffled pocketbook-driven opposition to migration exposes the long-standing competition between black voters and immigrants for economic opportunities and civic status.

Politico reported in 2021:

The [Latino] impact on Chicago has been stark, not only in the feeling and identities of neighborhoods like Englewood, but in the power politics of the nation’s third-largest city. Latino residents are beginning to replace Black residents, forcing a realignment in Chicago’s political scene — and a return of the bare-knuckle tribal fights that made Chicago’s City Hall legendary.

“Today … Black and brown communities battle each other for a greater stake in city government,” Politico added.

Many black residents in Chicago can trace their path from southern states to the city from Congress’ 1924 immigration shutdown. The shutdown made northern employers eager for blacks, who made huge economic gains by moving to California, New York, Chicago, and many other cities.

But those gains stalled and shrank after Congress reopened international migration in 1965 and doubled the inflow in 1990.  In 2017, individual blacks in Chicago earned around $30,303 per year — which was less than the median income of $41,188 for Latinos in Chicago.

On February 11, the Wall Street Journal reported a local protest against the inflow of migrants into a former schoolhouse in the mostly-black and poor Woodlawn district, south of downtown:

“I’ve got nothing against them,” Luis Cardona, a retired tow-truck driver who helped organize Friday’s demonstration, said of the migrants. “We need to help the people here that need it, and then help the other people.”

In Woodlawn, some residents said the neighborhood has long been underserved by the city, and that the reopening of the school to house migrants represented another instance of the city acting against the community’s wishes.

The school’s closing was “like a feeling of just total disregard and disrespect for the community,” said Patricia Hightower, an 80-year-old community activist.

Latino, Asian, White, and black immigrants also tend to look down on American blacks, according to a December 2022 study by an assistant professor at Boston College.

“First-generation immigrants of all racial and ethnic groups display more negative attitudes toward Black Americans than do their native-born co-ethnics,” wrote Masha Krupenkin in her study, titled,  “Where the Streets Are Paved With Gold: Immigrants’ Racial Attitudes in a Land of Inequality.”

Immigrants remain more anti-Black than second- and third-plus-generation Americans, even after controlling for race, age, gender, education, income, and partisanship. The differences between these groups cannot be explained by immigrants’ lower income, or differences in their level of education. On all four measures and all four surveys, immigrants were significantly more anti-Black than both groups of native-born Americans.

Chicago’s story is a mirror of the civic conflicts created by the government’s 1965 imposition of population diversity that made it difficult for black Americans to rise.

For example, after a national income uptick in the low-migration years of 2019 and 2020, a March 2021 report by Pew Research noted:

The median income among Black households in 2019 was roughly $44,000, representing a slight inflation-adjusted increase over the median household income for Black people in 2000 ($43,581 after adjusting for inflation).

Nationally, blacks split 45 percent to 45 percent on whether legal immigration should be decreased or increased, said a FoxNews poll of 1,003 registered voters in January 2023. Nationwide, the split was 49 percent for a decrease and 43 percent for an increase.

However, nearly all black legislators in Congress tend to vote for pro-migration laws, especially when their districts fill up with pro-migration Latino and Asian voters.

Chicago’s black population peaked at about 1.2 million in 1980, just as its black leaders took control of the city machine from a long-dominant bloc of ethnic Irish voters. This political power was built when many blacks migrated from the south after Congress blocked international migration from 1924 to 1965.

But since the 1980s, many blacks have moved out to the suburbs or distant poor cities — such as Ferguson, Missouri — or back to southern cities, such as Atlanta. Their exit was accelerated when city leaders work with real-estate developers to bulldoze crime-ridden housing projects, so freeing up much real estate along the lakeshore for profitable housing.

The out-migration dropped the black population to roughly 800,000 as millions of Latinos moved into U.S. cities, including Chicago.

The Latino migration was welcomed by employers, landlords, and city officials. In 1985, for example, the city’s first black Mayor, Harold Washington, declared a “sanctuary city” to guard illegal migrants against federal immigration law.

Thirty-eight years after that welcome, blacks comprise just under 30 percent of the population and are slightly outnumbered by the rising number of Latinos. In 2022, city leaders agreed on a new political map that created 16 majority-black districts and 14 majority-Latino districts.

In 2022, city leaders agreed on a new political map that created 16 majority-black districts and 14 majority-Latino districts. Those numbers will likely flip once the 2030 census is completed.

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