CHICAGO — Local leaders and immigration nonprofits are pushing to fast track the lengthy, bureaucratic process for migrants to get work permits as the city continues to welcome thousands of newcomers.
Since last August, more than 13,500 people, most from Central and South America, have arrived in Chicago. Buses are still coming daily. Many asylum seekers are from Venezuela, which has been struggling with an economic crisis that has caused severe food and medicine shortages, hyperinflation, widespread unemployment and violent crime.
There are nearly 2,000 migrants being housed in police stations and at O’Hare Airport, and 6,800 in 18 shelters across Chicago.
With the city poised to spend about $255 million addressing the needs of migrants by the end of the year, helping migrants become self-sufficient is the city’s way out of the humanitarian crisis, experts said. But processing delays and complex eligibility questions present barriers for those seeking work permits.
It can take a year for asylum seekers to get a work permit after they apply, legal analysts said.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, Gov. JB Pritzker, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia and other politicians have ramped up pressure on President Joe Biden’s administration to address the challenges facing migrants who want to legally work, but there’s been no movement yet.
When people are unable to work legally, they’re in a vulnerable position, immigration officials who are working on the front lines with migrants said.
Last month, a group of migrants staying in a shelter Downtown started cutting people’s hair in a nearby park to pass the time, make money, show off their skills and provide a service.
But seven of the barbers were arrested and cited a few weeks later for operating an unlicensed business and selling or offering goods without a permit on park property, police said.
Block Club talked with legal experts in the immigration field to explain who is eligible for a work permit, what obstacles they face and how the federal government could improve the situation.
How Long Does It Take For An Asylum Seeker To Get A Work Permit?
There are two primary avenues for the migrants arriving to Chicago to get a work permit. The first is to apply for asylum, said Lisa Koop, director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Someone seeking asylum has one year from the time they arrive in the U.S. to apply, Koop said. Once someone has filed for asylum, they then have to wait 150 days before they’re eligible to apply for their employment authorization document, or EAD, she said.
The U.S. is supposed to process work permits 30 days after an asylum applicant applies, but there are often delays, she said.
“We’re not seeing them meet that timeline in many cases, but the idea is that it’s supposed to be somewhat efficient after the 150 days [pass],” Koop said.
Cindy Buys, a law professor at Southern Illinois University who specializes in international and immigration law, said the backlog in getting a work permit didn’t always exist. Now, processing times can take close to six months, she said.
The increasing number of people eligible for a work permit is contributing to the slow processing times, Buys said.
“We’ve had a number of humanitarian parole programs where we have allowed tens of thousands of people to come into the country who are potentially eligible for these employment authorization documents, so it’s just taking longer to process them because of the numbers,” she said.
Best case scenario, someone applying for asylum waits about six months for their work authorization. But many people aren’t able to apply for asylum right away, so the six-month clock doesn’t start until after they’ve been in Chicago for a couple of months, Koop said.
“We’re seeing people spend their first couple of months in Chicago kind of getting their bearings, figuring out where they’re going to live, figuring out how to send their kids to school, figuring out basic survival things before they reach a point where they’re ready to apply for asylum,” Koop said.
There’s a lot of room for error in the asylum process, too. If there’s an issue with someone’s application after they’ve submitted it, that can also lead to delays, Koop said.
“After you file that asylum application, oftentimes you’re receiving other notices that you have to respond to,” she said. “If you don’t follow those steps and continue meeting the requirements of the asylum process, that clock towards 150 days stops counting. So, a big concern of ours is people who are living in the shelters and moving around and don’t have a stable address.”
Once an asylum applicant gets their work permit, it’s valid through the time it takes for their asylum claim to be decided, Buys said. The average length of an asylum case is about six years, and the work permit needs to be renewed every two years, she said.
How Does Someone Get A Work Permit If They Aren’t Applying For Asylum?
Not all migrants arriving in Chicago qualify for asylum, and applying for asylum isn’t the only way for migrants to get a legal work permit, experts said.
Asylum is protection for people who face persecution in their country of origin, and usually that persecution has to be based on an individualized characteristic that a person has, Koop said.
“People who are fleeing situations with really devastating natural disasters, or generalized violence, or economic collapse — those might not be viable asylum claims,” she said. “So, part of what we’re doing is trying to help people understand who should be pursuing asylum and who would be better off on another path.”
Many migrants, once they cross over the U.S.-Mexico border, are released from federal custody under parole, Koop and others said.
Defined by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, parole “allows an individual, who may be inadmissible or otherwise ineligible for admission into the United States, to be paroled into the United States for a temporary period.”
The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the Secretary of Homeland Security discretion to parole non-citizens who want to admitted into the U.S. temporarily “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website.
People who have parole can request employment authorization immediately, Koop said. But that work permit only lasts as long as the length of a person’s parole, which varies.
“The challenge has been so many people who have been issued parole have been issued parole for such a limited time that their parole runs out before they can ever achieve employment authorization,” she said.
The parole lengths for folks currently arriving to Chicago, either on their own or on a bus from Texas, varies, anecdotally.
Erendira Rendon, vice president of immigrant justice with the Resurrection Project, said she’s seeing many people who have only been paroled for a few weeks or a few months.
“If your parole is only two months or two weeks, then you can’t apply for a work permit because by the time they get your application, your parole is over,” she said.
But Koop said she’s also seen people who have been granted about a year.
The problems with parole-based work permits are the delay in getting those permits approved and the reluctance of the federal government to renew a person’s parole, Koop and others said.
A person with parole can apply to have it renewed, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website.
Koop and Rendon said people arriving in Chicago from Central and South America are applying for parole renewal only to have it denied. So, if someone has a two week parole and it isn’t renewed, they don’t have a chance at getting a work permit.
What Could Help More People Get A Work Permit?
City, state and federal leaders have been doubling down on calls for Biden’s administration to streamline the work permit process and expand parole.
Since people with parole are immediately eligible to apply for a work permit, politicians and legal experts said it’s the most efficient avenue to speed up migrants’ ability to work.
In the past nine months, the federal government has paroled over 500,000 people through humanitarian parole, Rendon said. This includes recent refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan, and folks from Central and South America, she said.
Rendon and the Resurrection Project are part of a coalition of nonprofits, politicians and other groups that are advocating for an expanded use of parole based on significant public benefit.
On Aug. 28, Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker co-wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking the federal government to leverage the significant public benefit designation to grant work permits to migrants to address a shortage of workers.
“This would unquestionably contribute ‘significant public benefit’ to our nation’s labor shortages while providing non-citizens, like the thousands of asylum seekers we serve, a faster and more streamlined pathway to self-sufficiency,” they wrote.
Johnson and Pritzker were joined by a slew of other state and congressional leaders at a press conference Aug. 30 where they repeated those calls.
“The best way for us to manage through this lengthy crisis is to tap into the extraordinary value that immigrants bring to our workforce,” Pritzker said during that press conference. “We have the jobs, we have the people. We just need authorization from Washington.”
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, “there is no statutory or regulatory definition of ‘significant public benefit.’ Parole based on significant public benefit includes, but is not limited to, law enforcement and national security reasons or foreign or domestic policy considerations.”
Legal experts point to the parole opportunities given to recent refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan as examples of the authority the federal government has in designating parole for the Central and South American migrant arrivals in Chicago.
With those programs, people were given more favorable parole lengths and had employment authorization right from the start, Koop said.
“We just think that that those same benefits should be extended to other immigrant populations,” she said.
Karina Ayala-Bermejo, president and CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, said the nonprofit has joined the call for the significant public benefit parole as another pathway for migrants to get work.
While the city is working to meet new arrivals’ immediate needs, like housing, food, medical care, Ayala-Bermejo said the top two things migrants ask for are legal help and work.
“[Work authorization] is the most critical way we can help stabilize our families, because this temporary setup is unsustainable longterm. It would reduce the burden that municipalities are dealing with financially,” she said.
But manpower of the legal field hasn’t been able to keep up with the increased need for assistance on asylum applications or employment documents, Koop said.
“The need far, far, far outpaces the legal resources,” Koop said. “But I think there have been a lot of really great efforts by legal services organizations and by the city and the state to figure out how to scale up access to counsel, access to legal resources. It’s an ongoing challenge.”
RELATED: A ‘Dire’ Shortage Of Lawyers Making Chicago’s Migrant Crisis Even Worse
Nonprofits have been raising concerns about the “dire” shortage of lawyers and case managers for months and are pushing for more funding to hire attorneys and expand networks of pro-bono support.
Koop said funding needs to be directed to meeting people’s immediate and longterm needs.
“We have to respond to the acute needs that people are presenting when they arrive, because if they’re unhoused, if their basic needs aren’t being met, they’re not going to be in a position to take advantage of legal services,” she said. “But it is also true that in order for people to find stability and be able to move forward and become independent, they need to get moving on their legal claims.”
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