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Chicago Takes Action on the Migrant Crisis. But Are the Voters Any Happier? Oliver Wiseman

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A group of migrants at a Migrant Landing Zone in Chicago in January. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

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In January, Free Press staff writer Olivia Reingold met the Chicagoans furious at their city’s handling of the migrant crisis. 

(Read her dispatch: “They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants.”)

Two months on, Chicago’s progressive mayor Brandon Johnson has finally shown signs that he is listening to the voters who say the city is struggling to handle the strain of new arrivals. 

This week, Chicago began evictions to enforce a new 60-day limit designed to get migrants out of city-run shelters and into permanent housing. The new policy will see more than 2,000 migrants evicted by the end of April. (Approximately 11,000 migrants are currently housed in city-run shelters.) 

Is the eviction policy easing voter anger? Or will the immigration issue continue to turn voters in this deep-blue city red? Olivia made a few calls to find out. 

(Trigger warning: if you’re reading this in the White House and don’t want to be in a bad mood for the rest of the day, you may want to skip the next few paragraphs.) 

Thomas Simmons is a 70-year-old retired city commissioner who says he “used to be a true Democrat.” He told The Free Press that the new 60-day limit is “full of bull. If you’re going to evict them, why not just send them back?”

Simmons, who is black, says the migrant crisis has forced him to reconsider his political allegiances: “It made me more open to Trump. When he wins, he’s going to send them back. . . . Honestly, I’m going for Trump.” 

Roland Dates, a black, 62-year-old lifelong Democrat from Chicago’s West Side, says the migrant crisis keeps getting worse. Speaking to The Free Press the day before the Illinois primary, he said, “I’m going to go straight Republican. . . I’ve got to go with the lesser of two evils.” 

Dates is skeptical that the 60-day eviction policy will really change how the city handles migrants. “That’s a game,” he says. “They say that, but they’ll just get an extension and another extension.” 

Of his voting intentions come November, he says: “I guess Trump’s the man.” 

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

 

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Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

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The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?


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It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

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Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.


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Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

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On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?

Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?

Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.

Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.

“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.

Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.

What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.

They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.

Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.

So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.


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