Community meetings led by Chicago officials grew more contentious in the early months of 2023 as the city scrambled to find housing for a growing number of asylum-seekers.
People shouted for immigrants to be sent to other neighborhoods. Others called for them to leave the country entirely. Residents, recalling decades of disinvestment in their neighborhoods, were frustrated.
The tensions surrounding immigration this year only continued to grow across the country and even in places like Chicago, which has touted itself as a welcoming city since the days of Mayor Harold Washington. So much so that now immigration advocates are bracing for even harsher restrictions and deportation measures that incoming President Donald Trump has promised his supporters.
At Chicago Public Media, the umbrella organization for the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, we decided to look at other countries’ immigration efforts as part of the Democracy Solutions Project. The Pulitzer Center named me and two of my colleagues Longworth Media fellows, which allowed us to explore these potential solutions outside the United States.
I was tasked with looking at our neighbors to the north in Canada to see what we could learn from their more welcoming approach to immigration. I focused on Toronto because of its similarities to Chicago.
Toronto has more than 3 million residents, while Chicago has 2.7 million people. Both sit along a Great Lake and feature scenic trails and roads along Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario.
About 20% of Chicago’s population are foreign-born, while immigrants make up 46% of Toronto’s population. Walking around Toronto, I saw how immigration had shaped the city through the Asian, Caribbean and Latino shops clustered along city blocks.
As I talked to experts and community members months before traveling to Toronto in April, I started to hear stories about how city shelters were filled to capacity, leading people to sleep in the streets. These immigrants, known as refugee claimants, had long fallen through the cracks in Canada’s immigration system, experts said.
The stories reminded me of the migrants we interviewed after they arrived in Chicago and ended up spending weeks inside or outside Chicago Police Department stations while waiting for a shelter bed.
Once I landed in Toronto, I connected with churches and social service organizations on the front lines of helping asylum-seekers find their footing in Canada. One of those people receiving their help was a 37-year-old woman we met at a park just outside of Toronto. She lived at a local church before moving into a rented home with others seeking asylum in Canada. She was authorized to work and did so at a local bakery.
As we talked at a picnic table, the woman went through a range of emotions as she recounted having no choice but to flee her home country after she was attacked because of her sexual orientation.
“In Kenya, when they find out that you are bisexual or that you are LGBTQ, some people disappear,” she told me.
I met more people fleeing political persecution from other countries. The stories echoed the kind of violence and fear we had heard from people fleeing Venezuela who ended up in Chicago.
Reporting on these stories made global displacement tangible. It felt overwhelming trying to find solutions to such a complex problem.
But we did find some things that were working.
For example, we walked through a motel repurposed into a shelter for refugee claimants managed by a local organization called Homes First. On average, people were staying in the motel for about a year because Homes First prioritized helping the residents find stable work.
We also spoke to a different population of immigrants who migrated through Canada’s Express Entry system, which was more modern and easier to navigate. It also gave people a path to citizenship, something many immigrants in America long for.
We spent time with families like Tyler Thom and Eddie Fernandez who had lived in Milwaukee before moving to Toronto.
In the U.S., Fernandez had been part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but the couple grew increasingly worried after his petition to adjust his status to a permanent U.S. resident was denied. It was Trump’s first presidential term, and things seemed to be getting more hostile for immigrants.
Now settled in Toronto, both are Canadian citizens, and Fernandez was able to vote for the first time. Fernandez said he no longer feels the tension and heaviness that had followed him in the United States.
“This is what it feels like to be kind of normal — that you aren’t worried about a status, immigration,” he told me.
Will immigrants in the United States ever feel that relief? That could be a long way away here. While officials in Canada have also started to curb some permanent and temporary immigration, it’s still far less restrictive than in the U.S.
Will the restrictions stop global displacement?
I think back to the woman who fled Kenya due to the harassment about her sexual orientation. I wonder if the solutions we were seeking could be found if more people sat at a park bench for about an hour talking to someone like her.
“I will be very happy knowing that I will have my freedom, and I will live peacefully,” she said about her future in Toronto.
I think that’s what most people want out of life, too.
