Juan González on Democracy Now!: U.S. “Economic Warfare” Targeting Venezuela, Cuba & Nicaragua Fuels Migrant Crisis

Juan González, on Democracy Now!, discusses his new report on “The Current Migrant Crisis,” about how U.S. policy toward Latin America has fueled historic numbers of asylum seekers. He argues U.S. “economic warfare” against countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela is what motivates many migrants to risk the journey north. “We’re seeing this enormous increase from these three countries. What do all these three countries have in common? They are all being subjected to United States sanctions,” says González. “The sanctions are reducing the ability of people to survive in the region, and then we’re surprised by all these people appearing at the border.”

From Democracy Now! (An independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.)

 

The Current Migrant Crisis: How U.S. Policy Toward Latin America Has Fueled Historic Numbers of Asylum Seekers

Executive Summary:

The U.S. immigration crisis has reached a new boiling point. Apprehensions by federal agents of people crossing the U.S. Southern border is at a near-record high. For the past year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers have appeared in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Denver, many of them dispatched northward in buses by the governors of Texas and Florida. The newcomers have overwhelmed local governments as municipal leaders frantically try to provide them emergency shelter, food and other basic services, while the news media constantly note the surprising number of destitute and displaced Venezuelans among them. That emergency assistance, however, has sparked a growing backlash from the general public, particularly among Americans who advocate clamping down on immigration, but also among some low-income Black and Latino residents in those cities whose communities have suffered years of neglect by the same local governments. Many of those residents have voiced increasing alarm about the sudden diversion of scarce tax funds for the siting of temporary migrant shelters in their neighborhoods.

But few media accounts have examined the way U.S. foreign policy toward specific Latin American countries has directly fueled the current crisis. Nor have those narratives acknowledged the long history of U.S. intervention and wealth extraction in the region, which, together with decades of neglect of Latin America’s social needs by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington, has led to more than six decades of massive human migration from that region to the U.S.

This report briefly outlines the evidence that U.S. economic warfare against three specific countries – Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua – is a significant cause of the latest migration surge. It argues, furthermore, that progressive U.S. leaders and the general public should advocate for a more humane and responsible foreign policy – one that could not only dramatically reduce migration from the region but also address the mushrooming labor shortage within the U.S.

Author:

Juan González,
Senior Research Fellow, UIC Great Cities Institute; and Co-Host of Democracy Now.

 

Read the Full Report Here.

 

U.S. Policy Toward Latin America Fueling Historic Numbers of Asylum Seekers.

Executive Summary:

The U.S. immigration crisis has reached a new boiling point. Apprehensions by federal agents of people crossing the U.S. Southern border is at a near-record high. For the past year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers have appeared in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Denver, many of them dispatched northward in buses by the governors of Texas and Florida. The newcomers have overwhelmed local governments as municipal leaders frantically try to provide them emergency shelter, food and other basic services, while the news media constantly note the surprising number of destitute and displaced Venezuelans among them. That emergency assistance, however, has sparked a growing backlash from the general public, particularly among Americans who advocate clamping down on immigration, but also among some low-income Black and Latino residents in those cities whose communities have suffered years of neglect by the same local governments. Many of those residents have voiced increasing alarm about the sudden diversion of scarce tax funds for the siting of temporary migrant shelters in their neighborhoods.

But few media accounts have examined the way U.S. foreign policy toward specific Latin American countries has directly fueled the current crisis. Nor have those narratives acknowledged the long history of U.S. intervention and wealth extraction in the region, which, together with decades of neglect of Latin America’s social needs by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington, has led to more than six decades of massive human migration from that region to the U.S.

This report briefly outlines the evidence that U.S. economic warfare against three specific countries – Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua – is a significant cause of the latest migration surge. It argues, furthermore, that progressive U.S. leaders and the general public should advocate for a more humane and responsible foreign policy – one that could not only dramatically reduce migration from the region but also address the mushrooming labor shortage within the U.S.

Author:

Juan González,
Senior Research Fellow, UIC Great Cities Institute; and Co-Host of Democracy Now.

 

Read the Full Report Here.

 

At Home with the Collective: A Summit on Communal Housing

Event Description

Please click here to RSVP.

This 2-day summit will gather speakers from around the world, local stakeholders and activists, as well as city officials who have radically rethought established norms of living, models of homeownership, and the formal, programmatic, material, and legal parameters of housing. Our ambition is to generate new knowledge that can confront the current crisis and speak to the potential of collective housing as a productive challenge for architecture.

While housing could be described as one of the primary forms of architecture and one of today’s most crucial tasks, spatial practices have been slow in rethinking established forms of living and the politics and economies surrounding it. Indeed, escaping the pervasive models of profit-based homeownership seems increasingly difficult when dominated by neoliberal market values. This summit, therefore, posits a radical shift from house to housing and from the individual to the collective as a mechanism to refocus housing as a community-building, solidarity-building, and city-building project.

Organized and chaired by Associate Professor Alexander Eisenschmidt.

 

Schedule

Thursday, October 19

   10:00 – Alexander Eisenschmidt Introduction

   10:15 – Form & Urbanism

  • Neeraj Bhatia (The Open Workshop), San Francisco and Toronto, Canada: “Forming Life in Common”
  • Meng Yan (Urbanus), Beijing, China: “Mini, Hybrid and Collective: Alternative Urban Dwelling in Chinese Megacities”
  • Martino Tattara (Dogma), Brussels, Belgium: “An Architectural Quest for Communal Housing: Ideas on Typology, Property, Construction, and the City”

   11:30 – Respondents: Sarah Dunn, UIC Architecture (UrbanLab) + Jaime Torres Carmona (Canopy Architects)

   12:30 – Break

   1:30 – Home & Refuge 

  • Golnar Abbasi, Rotterdam, Netherlands and Tehran, Iran: “Domesticities of Displacement, Extraction, and Revolution”
  • Sandi Hilal (DAAR), Bethlehem, Palestine: “Learning from Living Room”
  • Andrew Herscher, Ann Arbor, Michigan: “Humanitarianism’s Housing Question”

   2:45 – Respondents: Clare Lyster, UIC Architecture (CLUAA) + Julie Dworkin (Chicago Coalition for the Homeless)

   3:45 – Value & Property

  • Hilary Sample (MOS), New York City: “Housing and Communal Gardens”
  • b+ (Arno Brandlhuber & Olaf Grawert), Berlin, Germany: “Legislating Architecture: The Demolition Drama”
  • Felipe Vera, Chile: “Reimagining Housing in Times of Uncertainty”

   5:00 – Respondents: Grant Gibson, UIC Architecture (CAMESgibson)

Friday, October 20

   10:00 – Exchange & Community 

  • Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, New York City: “Housing and Social Reproduction”
  • Zvi Efrat, Tel-Aviv, Israel: “Amateurism and Total Design: The Architecture of the Kibbutz”
  • Cristina Gamboa, (Lacol), Barcelona, Spain: “Cooperative Housing as Infrastructures for Sustainable Living”

   11:15 – Respondents: Penelope Dean, UIC Architecture (Flat Out) + Laura Weathered (Near Northwest Arts Council)

   12:15 – Break

   1:15 – Organization & Advocacy

  • Lahbib El Moumni (MAMMA), Casablanca, Morocco: “From Paper to People: The Living Transformation of Casablanca’s Historic Homes”
  • Valeria Esteves (CCU), Montevideo, Uruguay: “Cooperative Housing: Collective Homeownership and Assisted Self-Management Experience”
  • Lúcia Lotufo (Usina CTAH), São Paulo, Brazil: “Building Self-Management Housing Practices in Architecture”
  • Christopher Hawthorne, New Haven: “Housing the Third Los Angeles”

   2:30 – Respondents: David Brown, UIC Architecture + Kathleen Day (Preservation of Affordable Housing)

   3:30 – Roundtable with Chicago Public and Cultural Leaders

   5:00 – Party

 

Additional Note

Registration for the summit is free and open to the public, but space is limited.

At Home with the Collective is sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research; the Institute for the Humanities; the Great Cities Institute; the Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement; the Social Justice Initiative; the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts; and the School of Architecture at UIC. The summit is supported by AIA Chicago and CES approval is pending. External funding is provided through grants by the Driehaus Foundation and the Chicago Community Loan Fund.

 

List of Speakers and Sponsors

Categories:

Mayor Brandon Johnson releases FY2024 Chicago City Budget released with a nod to community engagement.

On October 11, 2023, Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered his $16.6 billion budget recommendations for the City of Chicago to the City Council. In July, the City of Chicago Office of Budget Management (OBM), the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement, and the Office of Equity and Racial Justice (OERJ) partnered with UIC’s Neighborhoods Initiative (UICNI) at the Great Cities Institute to co-design and conduct engagement activities around the City’s 2024 budget. The “City of Chicago 2024 Budget Engagement Report” documents the 2024 budget engagement process and provides critical results from the engagement activities.

Activities were available in person at three public roundtables and one youth engagement event, and they were available online. In total, 812 people participated in the budget engagement.

Engagement activities gathered feedback from community members on the budget, reflections on Community-Identified Budget Ideas (community derived budget ideas and needs) and general comments regarding the budget or engagement. Data were collected in July and August 2023 across all budget engagement activities. The most noted request by topic area is as follows:

  • Affordable Housing and Services to People at Risk of or Experiencing Homelessness – Develop affordable housing units across many different building types through public and nonprofit organizations, in specific areas of the city, and for designated populations.
  • Community Engagement – Improve outreach and communication using strategies such as bus ads, posted information in community centers (e.g., libraries, schools, religious institutions), news media, radio, community boards, and building lists of community leaders.
  • Community Safety – Cancel the ShotSpotter contract for community safety to minimize unwarranted surveillance of communities with ineffective technology.
  • Environmental Justice and Infrastructure – Increase funding for public transit, including to improve affordability, develop more bus stops, increase CTA reliability, fund the Red Line extension, and ensure cleaner and more youth-friendly transportation.
  • Neighborhood and Community Development and Arts and Culture – Increase investment to neighborhoods on the South and West Sides for more equitable distribution of resources to communities (and tracking of resource distribution).
  • Public Health and Services and Mental Health – Provide culturally responsive mental health services, with mixed ideas on publicly run and community-run organizations, peer-to-peer approaches, and on-call social workers.
  • Youth Services – Provide a greater variety of programming and offerings to occupy them and to build skills outside of school, including after-school programs, sports and clubs, arts, Big Brother/ mentorship programs, substance abuse prevention, financial literacy, gang prevention, literacy, music, sexual awareness, summer programs, tutoring services, and youth programs.

 

To inform the development of department budgets and the Mayor’s 2024 budget proposal, all ideas and comments collected from participants during the 2024 engagement were shared in August 2023 with City department leaders and staff. In addition, interim survey findings and data were shared with the OBM, the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement, and the OERJ in early September 2023. Of note, Mayor Johnson mentioned new budget investments in his 2024 budget proposal that were also requested by community participants during the budget engagement (found in the City of Chicago 2024 Budget Engagement Report in the detailed results by topic area) including, but not limited to:

  • Provide a $250 million investment in homelessness supports, from flexible housing, shelter operational support, and low-income home repair assistance.
  • Reopen two shuttered mental health clinics as part of a pilot program in existing city buildings.
  • Double the number of staff on the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement teams that provide an alternate response to mental health calls.
  • Hire new detectives by promoting 70 officers to detective since he took office, and in the budget recommendations by creating 100 additional detective positions.
  • Reinstitute the city’s Department of Environment to provide support for environmental protection.
  • Expand youth jobs with 76 million dollars to fund an additional 4,000 youth summer jobs next year, with the goal of 28,000 positions in the summer of 2024.
  • Address lead service line replacement with an over $53 million investment.

 

To track progress internally, the OERJ released the City of Chicago 2024 Equity Report which reports department plans through numbers and narratives to track progress on racial equity goals. Equity was used as a lens during roundtable conversations and informed departments during their budget requests over the summer. All budget documents released by the city reside on the Office Budget and Management Microsite.

Chicago-Based Research Initiative Wants to Provide Data and Insight Around a Growing Latino Population

“The Great Cities Institute has poured research into Latino communities with reports spanning the impact of COVID to gentrification.

So, it seemed natural to put their efforts together to create the Latino Research Initiative.

The goal is to become a data hub for community groups, policy-makers and others…”

From WTTW News

For more information, click here.

 

Chicago’s migrant crisis tied to U.S. foreign policy

“For more than a year, Chicago has been grappling with the influx of Latin American migrants being sent from red states. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration is currently making plans to house asylum seekers in tent cities. Meanwhile, in Washington last week, President Joe Biden moved to grant Venezuelan migrants temporary protected status, speeding up the process for thousands of asylum seekers in Chicago to get work permits. One local expert says the plight of Latin American migrants — and that of the city’s — are intertwined. Juan González is senior fellow at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago. He recently sat down with WBEZ’s Esther Yoon-Ji Kang to discuss how U.S. foreign policy is key to understanding why migrants flee to the city and what more Chicago and Washington should do for immigrants.”

From WBEZ Chicago

For more information, click here.

 

Launching the Latino Research Initiative at Great Cities Institute

Video from Event

 

Event Description

Great Cities Institute is launching the Latino Research Initiative (LRI) and would like to invite all who are interested to join us on September 12 to hear about some of the work of the initiative and to network among yourselves. Juan González, Senior Fellow at GCI and the co-host of Democracy Now, is our keynote speaker and will discuss Chicagoland Latinos in the larger context of national and international issues. See the flyer below for the full agenda. Light breakfast and lunch are provided. RSVP on the link below.

 

The RSVP link is provided on the flyer or you can also RSVP here.

Download Flyer PDF.

Download Biography of Speakers and Moderators.

Categories:

Juan González Headlines Great Cities Launch of Latino Research Initiative

Juan González, Senior Fellow at Great Cities Institute, Co-Host of Democracy Now, and Author of Harvest of Empire will headline the launch of GCI’s Latino Research Initiative on September 12, 2023, from 8:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. at Student Center East Room 301 (750 S. Halsted). In Juan’s speech, he will bring a national and international context to his reflections on issues and opportunities facing Latinos in Chicagoland.

We invite you to join us in what promises to be a very interesting and exciting program. Please go to the GCI event page, where you will find the flyer with the detailed agenda and a link to RSVP.

The purpose of the Initiative is to provide a focus and hub through which collaborations among UIC faculty, staff, and students, and communities and other stakeholders will produce research that be used by policy makers, program developers, advocates, educators, and others to advance quality of life for Latino communities and in so doing, contribute to the betterment of Chicago, the region, and the state.

The event to launch the Latino Research Initiative will include panels that feature several of our external partnerships as well as research of Latino professors at UIC, who are faculty affiliates of the Latino Research Initiative. We will also highlight the work of Great Cities research staff and former students.

There are several reports that will be discussed throughout the day:

 

We look forward to your joining us.