ROCKFORD, Ill. (WLS) – Eight migrant buses were in route to Chicago Sunday morning after a plane from Texas carrying over 300 asylum seekers landed in Rockford overnight.
The migrants were flown from Texas to Illinois in a jumbo jet, landing at Rockford International Airport, Rockford ABC affiliate WTVO reported.
The migrant crisis Chicago has been grappling with has once again made its way to the suburbs.
After the plane landed, the passengers were reportedly immediately put on buses heading to Chicago’s landing zone near West Polk Street and South Desplaines Street.
The City of Chicago issued a statement Sunday afternoon, saying that city officials had been notified by Rockford of the plane’s arrival. Eight buses from Rockford have dropped off migrants in multiple suburbs on the way to Chicago, but they have not yet reached Chicago, city officials said.
Texas does have a more developed system for handling asylum seekers, so yeah.
Does it? Seems like they system boils down to:
Put them in cages Ship them to another city/state Kill them Use them as cheap disposable labor
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If it snows in Texas do we point to Illinois and say then that Texans should be able to adapt fast enough because the Illini can handle a problem they’re used to?
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Both are unexpected events for which the affected area isn’t equipped but the other is. The main difference here is that people are responsible for dumping these humans into an area that’s not equipped to handle them, whereas no one is responsible for snow.
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I’m not sure that’s true, but I’d have to double check. I’m pretty sure it’s federal money to be spent as the state sees fit.
Also, in this analogy, this is a regular snow storm. It’s just, you know, you gotta have snow plows.
People literally do, so?
Then those people are wrong and don’t understand how dealing with snow or asylum seekers works.
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They weren’t wrong. Some of those fuckers died of exposure in 37 degree weather, inside a house, a simple blanket prevents that.
The inability for an individual to handle a situation and for a local government to handle a situation are two different things. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there wasn’t a single snow plow in Texas.
Graders are snow plows so, no, they have a bunch.
Let’s pretend that they do. Do you think the local Texas municipalities know everyone who has a plow attachment for their grader and loader that’s road-appropriate and do you think they have contracts with them for road plowing in the event that it snows in Texas? Do they have salt or sand spreads, too? Because if the answer to any of those is no, they ain’t clearing the roads to a safe condition.
Now, let’s go back to the original point. Chicago almost certainly has some capacity to handle asylum seekers. They’re a large city with an international airport. But that capacity is probably limited, since most of their direct international flights are coming from Canada. They don’t have enough capacity to handle having extra seekers flown in from other areas that typically handle more. They don’t have enough temporary housing contracted, they don’t have enough lawyers that specialize in asylum, they don’t have enough placement contacts to get people integrated while they wait for court, etc.
Having a system to deal with either snow or asylum seekers requires specialized knowledge, equipment, and organization, none of which are easy to scale overnight when you’re suddenly faced with a problem different to the one you’re set up for. The people shipping migrants across the country know this perfectly well, but they’re counting on you to be ignorant about it, hoping that you’ll believe a city can just turn on a dime and perfectly deal with a problem or a magnitude they’ve never faced before.