Immigration and Chicago

 Look, I can't help it if just when I'm starting talking about cities and immigration, I happen to go to a city where ICE is actively raiding people's homes. 

And when I do, I can't help but talk about Chicago and immigration--even if the series is supposed to be about where Americans could go.

For the record, every one of these pics is from this weekend--that is, no older pics, no pics from a time when the Trump administration wasn't claiming this city was a chaotic hell on earth that needs the national guard and ICE to keep it in line. Judge for yourself.

1. Chicago is a good place for immigrants (ICE excepted)

Look, Chicago right now is a vibrant, urbanist city with large immigrant populations and a culture that welcomes a wide range of people. Sure, it had the bad fortune of coming up against what is probably my favorite American city in the CityBracket challenge, but it's a damn good place, and only getting better. 

This particular Lady Liberty may be in the parking garage of Midway Airport, but the idea of welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free is not alien to Chicago outside its airports either.

It's a city with vibrant and international cultural influences, as in this public art on the Belmont station, and a city where this weekend I heard at least three different non-English languages being spoken on the street. It's a city where my biggest problem this weekend was figuring out which diverse cuisines and grocery stores I was going to visit, and a city where despite historical issues of redlining and ghettoization, you do genuinely walk past people who are different from you every block on the street.

2. Chicago is a good place for people, period

The city really has made strides in urbanism in recent years. Since I left a decade ago, there are new bike lanes:

(even if they do sometimes randomly end)

And the El remains one of the most iconic pieces of transit architecture in the US:

It's a city that maybe does sometimes sleep (it's not literally New York, which has that phrase on lockdown) but that is up and buzzing pretty much whenever you need it to be.

This was at 11pm. It's pretty active (and remember that I try not to get people in my photos, so this isn't representative of how many people were on the street at night).

I randomly ran across a farmer's market that shut down Division Street for several blocks, with excellent pastries (and the produce looked good too, but I ate the pastries).

It's a city that has less affordability problems than most major US cities, and that frankly I'd recommend to anyone moving here--which is probably why ICE decided to make it a target.

3. Chicago is cultured

Being the biggest city in a whole component part of the US (the Midwest) pays some dividends.

There's a lot of public art (this is also in Midway train station).

They decorate the streets for Halloween.

And I would be remiss not to mention traditional cultural amenities, like the Art Institute of Chicago (above), the symphony (literally behind me as I took this photo), or the active theatre scene.

All in all, if you wanted to move to an American city (and right now I'm not sure you should, but let's put that aside), I would highly recommend Chicago.

A city that's patriotic despite the fact that its government is literally trying to put troops on its streets, because it knows what America can be at its best--because it is America at its best. So yes: visas may be hard to get right now, and ICE may have a vendetta against the city, and US approval internationally is at a low point for obvious reasons. So people may not want to come at all. 

But if they do, Chicago is a great place to choose. 

And it knows where it stands on those other issues, anyway.