Editorial Roundup: Illinois
Arlington Heights Daily Herald. January 9, 2024.
Editorial: State must act where federal government has failed to address migrant influx
Each day, it seems, another suburb takes up the thorny issue: What is a town to do when busloads of migrants arrive in the bitter cold from Texas without notice and, at times, no way to get to Chicago to be processed?
In Aurora, the deputy mayor had to buy train tickets for asylum-seeking migrants when a bus driver told his passengers — many unprepared for the 29-degree weather — to get off at the transportation center without the means to move on. In Schaumburg, officials posted signs. In Palatine, police escorted a bus beyond its borders.
A growing number of towns have enacted regulations prohibiting drop-offs without notice and setting stiff penalties for bus companies that break the rules.
And so it goes in the deeply disturbing and highly inappropriate game of immigration Whac-A-Mole originated by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott amid an appalling lack of meaningful border solutions by the Biden administration, previous administrations and Congress.
It is long past time for the federal government to deal with the issues at the heart of the immigration crisis. But in the meantime, local communities need help managing a situation that they did not create and have no resources to address. That help can only come from the state. Illinois government must step in to provide urgent relief for a matter that grows more dire each day as the area is hit by snow and forecasts put next week’s temperatures below zero.
The 103rd General Assembly convenes in Springfield next week. The state has already committed millions of dollars to help, but money is not the only issue here. Legislators from across the state and across political parties need to come together to create consistent guidelines on how to handle the massive influx of migrants. They need a better coordinated statewide approach, one that does not leave tiny towns like Elburn to grapple with matters on their own.
And they need to do so quickly, with a speed and urgency often lacking in Springfield.
More than 30,000 migrants have already arrived in Chicago by bus, and another 4,000-plus by plane. As WBEZ reported Tuesday, the city’s “landing zone” is so overwhelmed that migrants are spending days aboard buses with little food and dwindling shelter options.
Since last month, buses trying to skirt new restrictions in Chicago have turned suburban train platforms and other sites into ill-prepared way stations for families who have already endured incredible hardships.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker spelled out his concerns in a letter to President Joe Biden this fall: “The federal government’s lack of intervention and coordination at the border has created an untenable situation for Illinois.”
Three months later, the situation remains untenable — both for the cold, confused masses being dropped off like unwanted cargo and the overwhelmed city and suburbs.
The piecemeal approach is not working, and solutions from Washington will not come in time to prevent chaos from turning into tragedy. The state must act. And it must do so now.
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Chicago Sun-Times. January 13, 2024.
Editorial: Out-of-state abortions soared in Illinois, and the numbers are likely to keep rising
Our reproductive rights bubble here in Illinois could become even more strained for resources due to anti-abortion laws elsewhere.
If you’ve read the latest news on the record number of women seeking abortions in Illinois since Roe v. Wade was overturned, consider these statistics, too:
Those who aren’t pregnant have also felt compelled to take action to protect themselves ever since Roe came under threat, according to a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine earlier this month.
The number of people seeking abortion pills spiked after the high court’s draft decision was leaked in May 2022. Not only did demand for the medication spike during that time period, but it did so on other occasions between September 2021 and April 2023 when news hit that access could be restricted, the JAMA research showed.
When the stress of a possible unwanted pregnancy on people who haven’t even conceived yet weighs heavily, imagine the strain on pregnant girls and women seeking an abortion when their own state has a ban or restriction on the medical procedure.
They have to do more than stockpile pills. They have to take more drastic steps, like finding an out-of-state clinic and planning for travel.
There were 92,100 people nationally who crossed state lines for abortion care in the first six months of 2023, the Guttmacher Institute found. That’s one in five patients, and more than double the 40,600 who took the same action in first half of 2020.
And it was Illinois that had the most patients seeking abortion care — 18,870 — between January and June 2023.
The year before, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization snatched away the constitutional right of Americans to make their own decisions about their pregnancies, nearly 17,000 patients came to Illinois for abortions.
Those numbers will likely only climb, as 2022 is expected to be the “tip of the iceberg,” as Megan Jeyifo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, told us.
Organizations like Jeyifo’s help ensure that Illinois can keep upholding its status as a haven for reproductive rights.
But as other states clamp down, the burden will only grow.
Should Florida pass a proposed bill that will ban nearly all abortions, it will have a “profound” impact here, Jeyifo said, noting that pro-abortion groups are competing with other crises for support.
Traveling already isn’t easy when it’s a vacation or family visit. Jumping into a car, bus, plane or train to get “essential” health care that has been stigmatized and politicized only adds to the physical and emotional trauma of patients, Jeyifo said.
We stressed this over the summer, and the latest data prove it once again: The fight to safeguard those seeking abortions in Illinois isn’t done.
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Bloomington Pantagraph. January 12, 2024.
Editorial: Questioning census is fine
Politicizing the census may be acceptable. But when it turns into a game of tribes belittling others. we may overstep the point.
The census is constitutionally required. It determines where our emphases need to be. Why wouldn’t we want every person possible counted? Why do we grumble over re-counts and make every discussion political?
To be sure, this isn’t a new trend. Going back more than two centuries, disputes have surrounded the U.S. Census. A 1787 compromise counted enslaved individuals as three-fifths of a person to apportion representation and taxation. Minorities can be sometimes conveniently ignored by census-takers. Or minorities can point to the World War II practice of locating individuals of Japanese descent using information from the census.
In advance of the 2020 census, the Supreme Court rejected a Trump administration proposal to add a question about citizenship. By the time people were able to knock on doors, the world had turned into a place that actively rejected interaction. The COVID pandemic negatively affected many things, including the 2020 Census.
Four years after the last census, almost a dozen small communities in the Midwest -- including Urbana -- are going to be counted again in hopes of getting a new grocery store or more state funding to build roads, fire stations and parks.
In the majority of these cases, city officials don’t think the numbers from the original count were inaccurate. Their populations have grown so fast in three years that officials believe they are leaving state funding for roads and other items on the table by not adding the extra growth to their population totals.
That’s the way the system is supposed to work. This isn’t designed as a census that counts people who aren’t there. The federal dollars that are dealt to cities, counties and states are designed to go to the places that need those dollars.
Local municipalities have to foot the bill for their special censuses. The cost ranges from just over $370,000 to almost $500,000 for the communities.
Unlike the 2020 census, the second counts won’t be used for redrawing political districts or determining how many congressional seats each state gets. Instead, they will be used to determine how much the communities will get in state funding that often is calculated by population size.
Nothing nefarious here. Just attempts to acquire as much of the pie as they’re allocated.
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