In May, when then-mayor Lori Lightfoot announced plans to house 250 Venezuelan migrants in the old South Shore High School, she ignited a nativist backlash that sounded like something from a Donald Trump rally. “It is a slap in the face that we as citizens of the United States of America do not have the resources and support, but you’re gonna bring people that are not citizens here in our buildings that we pay taxes for that you took away from us,” South Shore resident Natasha Dunn said outside a public meeting at the school. Inside, a protester waved a “Build the Wall 2024” placard.

Dunn is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that has temporarily halted the city’s plans. The suit contends that a 2019 city ordinance to employ the school as a police and fire training center prevents other uses. That’s the legal argument. The motivation is more complex: Many Black South Siders resent the prospect of migrants in their neighborhoods. That was evident in February when residents attempted to block buses delivering Latin American migrants to a shuttered Woodlawn elementary school. “There’s plenty of room in Little Village for their people,” one woman said.

Those passions poured out again at a May 31 City Council meeting, when demonstrators spoke against a proposal, which passed, to divert $51 million in federal opioid funds to feed and house migrants bused to Chicago from Texas and Florida. Why, they asked, wasn’t the city spending $51 million on the underserved South and West Sides — or on Black reparations? “We did not have the luxury and opportunity to cross the border,” bus blocker Andre Smith shouted during the public comment period. “We came here chained in the bottom of slave ships.” During the debate, protesters taunted 25th Ward alderperson Byron Sigcho-Lopez, an Ecuadorian immigrant, to “go back and fight in your home country.”

As Trumpian as the protesters sound, their nativism comes from a different place than the former president’s white nationalism: a perception that, throughout American history, newcomers have climbed the ladder of social and economic success, while Blacks, who have a 400-year history in this country, remain on the bottom rung. “We have waves of immigration in America, and every time, we get solidified in the bottom caste,” says lifelong South Sider Brian Mullins, cofounder of the Black American Voter Project, which encourages Blacks to consider candidates individually rather than allying with a political party.

Mullins calls himself a “foundational Black American” — a descendant of emancipated slaves. Once freed, those former slaves, Frederick Douglass wrote in his autobiography, were “elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant from the Emerald Isle whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place.”  Though the newcomers now originate more from Asia and Latin America, the impact remains. According to a 2007 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx: “For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for Black men, it fell a full 2.4 percentage points.” As Mullins sees it, immigrants undercut Blacks at the low end of the labor market: “From construction to stores, even the guy washing the windows, it’s a migrant charging less than the Black men.”

“No one should be surprised over tension between migrants and Black Americans,” says Adrian Norman, a member of the Black leadership network Project 21, which is affiliated with the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research. “There are destabilized communities across the entire country that have produced horrible outcomes for Black folks for decades, and there is a case to be made that those communities should be prioritized over individuals who forced their way into the country unlawfully.”

One reason residents are so rankled by the prospect of migrants in South Shore High School is that it was one of the 50 South and West Side schools closed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013, and thus is seen as a symbol of disinvestment in the community. Rosita Chatonda, cochair of the South Shore Community Action Council, would rather see that $51 million spent to improve educational outcomes for underprivileged children: “If we had $1 million per ward, we could service 100 children in that ward every year; we could graduate 5,000 low-income children.”

Despite opposition from the Black community, most Black alderpersons voted for the migrant funding proposal. Alderperson Jeanette Taylor, whose 20th Ward includes Woodlawn and Englewood, expressed the Black Caucus’s conflicted feelings. “As a Black person who was imported to this country, I am so tired of when it’s a crisis for everybody else, we gotta do something,” Taylor said at the meeting. “When we having this violence in the Black community, nothing gets said or done. I know it’s right to help other people, but when the hell y’all gonna help us? … In the 20th Ward, I don’t have a bowling alley, a movie theater.” Ultimately, she voted yes, explaining, “I don’t believe in hurting other people.”

Although the controversy is pitting Blacks against migrants, it is possible for both communities to win. The city is listening to the protesters’ pleas for investment. That was clear at the City Council meeting in May. “We do have enough [for everybody],” insisted 22nd Ward alderperson Michael Rodriguez, who suggested passing an ordinance that would increase taxes on high-end real estate transactions to fund homeless services. And 26th Ward alderperson Jessie Fuentes called for creating “alternatives to the carceral system.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson promised to continue public hearings on housing migrants in South Shore and other neighborhoods, and to bring development to destitute neighborhoods. After June’s City Council meeting, he touted the passage of an urban agriculture license enhancement ordinance, which will allow vacant-lot farmers to sell produce directly to the public: “Unfortunately, for too long, politics have established this zero-sum game, where people have lost at the expense of other people. … As I’ve said repeatedly, there’s more than enough to go around.”

Some of his constituents, though, feel they’ve been waiting four centuries to get their fair share of America’s bounty, and fear that this newest wave of migrants will cause them to wait even longer.