They’re refugee camps.
Who does the city thinks it’s fooling, calling its plan to call 2,000-person settlements “winterized base camps”? They’ve got tents. They’ve got refugees. They’re refugee camps.
Regular readers know that I’m all for immigrants. They’re what makes America great; not taking away women’s reproductive choices, not burning books, not demonizing vulnerable youth.
Immigrants. They’re why we’re not in a demographic death spiral, like Japan. Immigrants. C’mon in guys, make yourselves at home, grab a shovel, start digging, maybe your kid’ll go to Yale. If you want to celebrate your nation-of-origin’s independence day by driving around, waving flags, that doesn’t bother me a bit. Native-born Americans celebrate our country’s birth with cheap explosives that blow off their fingers and scare their pets. I can’t argue that’s any better. We’re a nation of personal freedom. Which is one reason you’re here.
But in this great, free country, words are important. A “base camp” is what Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set up at the foot of Mount Everest before pushing for the summit. Base camps are where the rebels operate from in the Nicaraguan jungle.
That plural is also important. Not a camp but camps, as in a number of them. Fran Spielman’s story Thursday mentioned one possible site, at 115th and Halsted. Where will the others go?
I know why the city balked at calling them by their proper name. Refugee camps are just not places we expect to find in 2023 America, or in America at any time, for that matter. Looking back over the sweep of history, I see what were at the time called “internment camps” — where American citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned after being ripped from their West Coast homes during World War II, moved inland under the spurious belief that their racial ancestry trumped their patriotism. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.
Maybe we can soften “refugee camps” by branding them. Can we sell naming rights? The Kenneth C. Griffin Outdoor Residential Facility? Goose Island Lager Gulag? Chicago was slow in branding Divvy when it was rolled out 10 years ago and left millions on the table. Don’t make the same mistake again.
It’s obvious why the city chose this route. It’s quicker, easier and less expensive to set up a tent than gut-rehab an unused elementary school. But reusing abandoned buildings adds to Chicago’s housing stock as a city, while the tents are just temporary. One hopes. Run a refugee camp long enough, it becomes Gaza City.
I have to agree with Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th) on this one. Chicago has so many abandoned buildings — the refugees should have been housed there. This is $30 million spent just to buy time — in the fine Chicago tradition of stopgaps, kicking cans down the road and slapping quick-fix bandages over long-term problems.
Chicago is already the nation’s scapegoat, with Floridians rejoicing each murder. What do you think a big refugee camp is going to do? Or half a dozen small ones? Every petty theft and fistfight will be paraded across Fox News like so many Semana Santa floats.
Bottom line: Chicago might not have a choice. It’s late September. Leaves are changing. Autumn arrives Saturday. Maybe rehabbing 500 apartments between now and Halloween just isn’t feasible.
So let me state the situation, clearly as I can: Desperate people flock to America because we’re the land of opportunity. That’s why my grandfather came here from Poland, why my grandmother left Galecia. And maybe why your grandfather left Italy, or your grandmother left China. You remember them with fondness, admiration and respect. And I bet, if you could somehow go back in time, 75 or 100 years, and give them a hand, you would leap to.
Well, now you can. Your grandmother is sleeping on the floor of a police station right now, the victim of a cheap political stunt perpetrated by despicable red state politicians. Chicago is trying to find them a place to stay. If it’s in refugee — whoops, base camps, then so be it. I think it’s a bad idea, but it might be a bad idea in the same sense as Winston Churchill’s definition of democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Setting up tent cities may be both a bad idea and the best option we have.
