Why we decided to create a resource guide for immigrants

Amid the chaos of ICE raids, deportations and federal attacks on Chicago’s protections of immigrants — following the arrival of more than 51,000 immigrants from the southern border who were bused or flown to Chicago from Texas — many community members are seeking factual, up-to-date information about immigration.

Approximately 1.7 million immigrants reside in the city, making up 18% of the population, and 828,800 are at risk of deportation (899,900 in Illinois), according to the Vera Institute. But the uncertainties affect many more Chicagoans: Immigrants comprise 22% of workers in Chicago, contribute $14.6 billion in local, state and federal taxes and represent an estimated collective spending power of $37.7 billion.

Meanwhile, mis- and disinformation is spreading to an unprecedented extent, fueled by social media, search and aggregation platforms that throttle news and no longer fact check posts. So we’re doing what we always have done: focusing on the facts, digging for the truth and vetting everything to help you discern the noise from the realities — and separate the sensationalism from the news that is worth your time.

Our journalists have been hard at work providing timely reporting about what’s happening and how all the news about immigration is affecting people in our communities, with personal stories documenting this impact on life in the Chicago area. And we’re always thinking about how we can best serve our communities with the information that matters most to them.

So today the Sun-Times and WBEZ are launching a new set of resources for immigrants as part of La Voz Chicago. We have created a series of stories — in English and Spanish — with information for immigrants tied together with a single frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) page to make it easy to navigate. We’re launching with a series of answers today but will continue to build upon this guide over the next month. It will be available in English and Spanish.

As part of this project, we’re also launching a new La Voz Whatsapp account to engage Spanish-speaking Whatsapp users in the Chicago area and help them find the local information they need. You can sign up here!

The idea for this project came out of our ongoing “We Hear You” series of community listening sessions and focus groups, when issues surrounding immigration came up repeatedly from residents in different neighborhoods across the city.

At those sessions, we also heard from a diverse range of immigrants — some recent; many longtime Chicago area residents — about the information they want and need. We surveyed our community partners — organizations throughout the Chicago area — to find out what questions they hear most from recent immigrants to the Chicago area and which questions are hardest to answer, hearing from 30 organizations that regularly interact with, or serve, migrants. Then, we went to work, tapping other news organizations and community organizations as well as government agencies, to get the latest and best answers we could find to those questions.

We hope you find this guide helpful! Feel free to send us feedback and any questions at lavoz@suntimes.com. Thanks for reading!