Editorial: Brandon Johnson is going to the border. What about Austin, Texas, to meet with Gov. Greg Abbott?

Mayor Brandon Johnson said Wednesday he plans to visit the U.S.-Mexico border soon. Precisely who from the administration is going, when they are going and what they plan to do there remains unclear. No doubt we will hear in due course.

In the meantime, might we suggest the mayor take a side trip to Austin, Texas, to sit down with Gov. Greg Abbott and try to negotiate some kind of sensible solution to a politically poisoned migrant crisis now rapidly spiraling out of control in our city?

We’d also suggest a couple of useful traveling companions for this pending trip to Texas.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, or a high-ranking surrogate, would be helpful since Chicago is in the state of Illinois and the citizens of the Land of Lincoln’s largest city cannot be expected to shoulder this huge new burden on its own.

President Joe Biden would be helpful in the middle seat on the flight down, too. Or perhaps his vice president, Kamala Harris, who specifically was given the mandate of mitigating the border crisis but appears to have done little or nothing in that regard.

Unlikely to happen, we know. That said, the only solution to what Chicago now is facing involves city officials (from Chicago and Texas), state officials (from Illinois and Texas) and federal officials (who bear the most responsibility for this), all getting together in a room and figuring out how to stop this craziness.

Of what craziness do we speak? Migrants arriving in the middle of the night on buses when there is no realistic chance of being able to access help. Migrants being bused to a city without the receiving entity getting adequate notice. Migrants being bused for political purposes at all.

The signs of the growing crisis now are very visible to Chicagoans in all neighborhoods and of all stripes.

On the Near North Side on a recent evening, several tents could be seen in front of the police station at 1160 N. Larabee St., all overflowing with people. Kids were running across the street to the Target store as their parents tried to keep them safe. Curious drivers and cyclists coming from downtown could be seen staring at the situation, thinking it through.

Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, tweeted Wednesday night that “a busload of migrants has arrived at Sears (Willis, if you prefer) Tower. Building management was not expecting them, and says they can’t stay in the lobby.”

On Tuesday night, there was a fatal stabbing of a 16-year-old girl in the Loop, not far from the former Standard Club, 320 S. Plymouth Court, which is now a migrant shelter.

Our point is not to imply that the incident involved migrants; as far as we know, it did not. Our point rather is to say that if you had traveled many miles with your family for a better life and ended up in Chicago with your teenagers, this news would be distressing in the extreme. Just as it would for any parent in a neighborhood where a killing has taken place.

All of this rapidly is spiraling out of control. Before long, it might not be an overstatement to say that the migrant crisis will be as vexing for this young Johnson administration as COVID-19 was for the administration of then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

City and state officials say they now have been told to expect 25 buses a day arriving in Chicago, filled with folks with no place to live, no easy avenue to work to support themselves and often with young kids in tow. That means 1,250 new arrivals per day.

The former Standard Club has 1,163 beds. That’s one of the larger shelters. At this rate of arrival, the shelter can accommodate one day’s worth of arrivals. Anyone watching the news can, of course, see that neighborhoods housing migrants are showing the signs of stress, with Chicagoans of all races arguing about the redistribution of resources, perceived changes in the levels of public safety and existing inequalities. This city cannot simply swallow these kinds of numbers without far more detailed levels of planning.

We know Pritzker has tried to tell Abbott to stop doing what he is doing and that he also has tried to pressure federal officials to offer more help. At the same time, we also hear Abbott’s argument that if Texas is overwhelmed by this migrant crisis, it is within its right to send people to places that have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” without fully realizing the potential implications of the words, given that some 7.7 million people reportedly have left the chaos that has been Venezuela, and many of them desire to move to the U.S.

With that line of thinking, such words were based on a kind of tacit manageability. By overwhelming left-leaning cities with the implications of their own promises, a political point has been made.

So stipulated. But at huge human cost. That’s the sad truth for anyone capable of seeing this issue without the limitations of political blinders. One side screams at the other, and misery ensues. It is a price being made for decades of inaction.

We don’t doubt our mayor will learn about, and subsequently recount, the difficulties of the migrant journey at the border. We don’t doubt the empathy he feels, as surely does his staff. He’ll no doubt return wishing that these migrants did not have to leave their homes or that the world was less cruel to them. And he won’t be wrong. All decent people feel that.

But what Chicago has here, right now, is an emergency. In New York, which faces much the same, Mayor Eric Adams was right when he said it could bring down the city, as least as known by the people who live there.

Chicago. New York City. Illinois. We — above all, Washington — must operate on two tracks.

Fix the overwhelming short-term crisis and the long-term issue. Call in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Compromise. Stop all the hurt for political gain.

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