Almost every day, Jesus Fernandez walks along Montrose Avenue in Uptown, ready to start cleaning building windows.
Fernandez, 40, a Venezuelan migrant, hauls a bucket and a large cleaning pole and, in his backpack, rags and a big bottle of antifreeze.
He arrived in Chicago nearly four months ago and is looking for a job. But, without a work permit and with five kids to support back home, he had to figure out a way to quickly make cash.
“I am willing to work on anything,” Fernandez says in Spanish.
He says that, when he gets work cleaning windows in a big building, he makes about $60 in less than three hours: “But some days I don’t make any money. I just walk.”
Like others among the more than 34,000 migrants sent to Chicago from Texas and other states since August 2022, Fernandez is desperate for money. Many are seeking asylum and might qualify for work permits. But the application process can take a long time. And not everyone knows where to go for help. Most migrants don’t speak English, making it harder to find work.
So migrants get creative. They do manicures, cut hair, cook food, clean houses and work construction, part of an underground economy that for years has been fueled by undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America.
Leonardo Bonilla Gonzalez is one of the new entrepreneurs. He cooks about 80 Venezuelan-style food lunches — meat, rice and plantains — out of his apartment and sells them for $10 outside migrant shelters.
“They place their order, and my job is to have it ready for them the next day,” Bonilla Gonzalez says in Spanish.
But making money isn’t easy, especially for migrants with children and no one to watch over them.
On a recent afternoon, Denisse, a migrant from Ecuador who arrived in Chicago in December, was peddling candy with her two sons on Irving Park Road. She carried her 3-year-old on her shoulders and dodged cars as her 10-year-old sat with a bag of lollipops on a corner across the street from her.
“I don’t want to just sit there with my arms crossed,” Denisse says in Spanish.
She is staying at a migrant shelter and spoke on the condition her last name not be published to protect her privacy.
“I don’t have a permit, but I need to make a living somehow,” she says.
She says she makes about $30 in an afternoon selling candy and needs to pay for medicine for her kids and bus passes to look for other jobs while worrying about long-term housing down the road.
To help address the migrant crisis, the Biden administration granted Venezuelans who were in the United States as of last July 31, temporary protected status, which allows them to apply for work permits and temporary relief from deportation. The administration also launched a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelans and migrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
The federal and state government recently partnered with city officials and the Resurrection Project, a Chicago nonprofit, to assist migrants staying at city shelters who are applying for work permits. They estimate that of the more than 15,000 migrants in shelters, roughly 4,650 are eligible for permits. As of Tuesday, some 916 people have received work authorizations through their efforts. Advocates say many migrants are looking for help outside these clinics.
Some undocumented immigrants who arrived before the migrant crisis worry new migrants are bringing wages down in the construction business. Outside a Home Depot near Avondale, a group of workers from Central America say they have been getting construction gigs outside the store for years. But now about 30 migrants stand near the store in the mornings and work for as little as $5 an hour, which is about three times less than what other groups of workers make.
“They don’t know that is not a living wage,” says Mauricio Huertas of the Latino Union, which advocates for immigrant workers. “And part of the conversation around that is telling them, like, ‘OK, sure, right now you have these transitional benefits to get you set up. But how do you expect to pay for housing … when you’re earning $5 an hour?’ ”
Other labor experts say the influx of migrants should be viewed not as a crisis but an opportunity to boost the economy and strengthen the labor force.
“Texas is going to feel so sorry they’ve shipped out the actual workforce to other states,” says Jaime di Paulo, president and chief executive officer of the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “In 10 years, Chicago and New York are going to have a very, very strong labor force because of that.”
Fernandez says he’s finding a steady clientele. Some days are be slow, but others he’’s fully booked.
“I’ll clean any windows,” he says in Spanish. “That’s my job now, and I like doing it. The only thing is that I don’t speak English.”
