Maine at the Crossroads: Mainers First or Mainers Last?

With each passing day, Maine sinks deeper and deeper into the quicksand of a potentially irreversible demographic, economic, cultural, and political transformation.

The trouble is, anyone who sounds the alarm about re-settling thousands upon thousands of unskilled, non-English speaking, non-citizens here after they crashed the southern border is maligned by Maine’s ruling class and its rumpswab media mouthpieces as a racist, a bigot, and a xenophobe. If that’s not enough to muzzle critics, the policy of unlimited open borders also enjoys bipartisan support at the State House swamp, thanks in large measure to the cheap-labor lobby’s outsized influence within the Maine GOP.

The migrant crisis afflicting Portland will be dramatically accelerated if the city gets its wish to offload 600 newly-arrived foreigners, most of whom began their journey to Maine from sub-Saharan Africa. About 300 of these “new Mainers” are currently being housed and fed at public expense in the Portland Expo – a sports and exhibition venue that’s been converted for the second time in four years into a homeless shelter exclusively for migrants who step off buses or commercial airliners almost daily in Maine’s largest city.

[RELATED: Unity College President Declines to Host Asylum Seekers Without Comprehensive Plan and Taxpayer Money….]

Portland’s political leaders, notably former socialist Mayor Ethan Strimling, created this problem. Now they’re looking to pass the buck to all taxpayers of Maine, pushing the migrant crisis they invited here deeper into rural Maine. Rather than sending the message that the greater Portland area cannot sustain such levels of unlimited immigration, Portland’s current set of left-wing apparatchiks only ask for the rest of us to help clean up the mess they created.

Lifelong Mainers who are homeless need not apply and are not welcome at the Expo. The same goes for homeless veterans. While the migrants are getting a roof, medical services, and three square meals a day, hundreds of Mainers are living in tents under an I-295 overpass and suffering drug addiction, which, coincidentally, has also been fueled by open borders. If you’re a longtime Maine resident experiencing homelessness, the best Portland and the state agencies can do for you is drive by once a month to toss you a bag of Narcan and some clean needles.

It also “sucks to be you” if you’re among the tens of thousands of Mainers who’ve been languishing for years on an affordable housing waitlist. You just got shoved to the back of the line (again) to accommodate people who have never paid a dime in Maine taxes – and have no right to be here. Bear in mind, the vast majority of migrants who have arrived since 2019 are eligible to work right now under federal rules

Lurching from crisis to crisis, Portland’s politicians proposed last week to relocate 600 migrants to rural Unity, Maine – a small town of 2300 people in Waldo County, 92 miles north of Portland. Maine taxpayers will be required to pick up the tab of $7.8 million – or more – to cover first-year expenses to house the foreign nationals on the 224-acre campus of Unity Environmental University. What an audacious scheme to shirk the consequences of deliberate decisions Portland’s leaders made to bring the city to this point!

If the proposed relocation happens, Unity’s population would increase by 26 percent almost overnight. However, their capacity to deal with health emergencies, police emergencies, and educational needs will remain flat. This cockamamie scheme is not an attempt to remedy the crisis Portland created; instead, this is an attempt to make that crisis someone else’s problem.

And with more than 1,500 border-crashers having arrived in Portland in the first six months of this year – and more arriving every day – how many more small towns in Maine are about to be overrun with busloads of poor people who don’t speak English and need healthcare for themselves, their school-age children, and their newborn anchor babies? How is it compassionate to invite thousands of migrants to Maine and then pass them around the state like a roving de facto refugee camp? How many more thousands of migrants must Maine welcome before we’ve satisfied our duty to the progressive gods of diversity and multiculturalism?

These are among the questions we dare not ask if we want to avoid ostracism from polite progressive society, not to mention character assassination by Foreigners First zealots and their legions of social-media hyenas. But if we flinch from asking the obvious questions, our grandchildren and great grandchildren will surely curse us in our graves – assuming the ruling class has not by that time flushed the records of the present historical moment down the memory hole.

Maine as a Sanctuary State

The story of how Maine arrived at its present crisis begins 20 years ago, in 2003, when the city of Portland declared itself a “sanctuary city” (or more accurately described, a harboring haven) for illegal immigrants. Combined with generous welfare benefits not available to illegals in most other states, Portland quickly earned an international reputation as a migrant mecca. By 2015, at least two Portland residents had paid with their lives so that progressive politicians on the city council could signal their virtue as champions of open borders.

Nonetheless, in 2017, the city once again reiterated its commitment to unlimited illegal immigration with an ordinance directing city authorities to ignore federal immigration detainers. Because the Portland police department does not inquire into suspects’ immigration status, it’s impossible to know with any certainty how many violent crimes are committed annually by foreign-born “new Mainers” who have settled in Maine’s largest city over the past two decades. And because police are barred from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, migrants have no fear of deportation if they’re caught committing any crime whatsoever.

The year following, the Portland area saw the two high-profile homicides of 49-year-old Freddy Akoa and 19-year-old Trey Arsenault. During my second term in the Maine House of Representatives, I sponsored a Governor’s bill to cut off all state funding to any municipality that prohibited police from inquiring into a criminal suspect’s immigration status. Democrats in the House promptly tabled the bill on March 15, 2016, effectively killing it without a public hearing or a roll call vote in either chamber. House Speaker Sara Gideon, a liberal Democrat from Portland, piled on with a scurrilous accusation, denouncing the bill as “blatantly racist.”

Open-borders zealots in the Legislature were emboldened to introduce LD 1492, “An Act To Attract, Educate and Retain New Mainers To Strengthen the Workforce,” sponsored by Republican Senator Roger Katz of Augusta. Though it ultimately died for lack of funding, Katz’s bill was something of a turning point in the long and winding road to Maine’s present predicament. His remarks at the public hearing set the narrative for the Foreigners First lobby at the State House, making illegal immigration appear not just respectable but positively virtuous.

In his prepared testimony before the Education Committee, Katz bemoaned Maine’s status as “the least ethnically diverse” state in the country.

“That is not something to be proud of,” he lectured.

Really, Roger? We’re supposed to be ashamed that Maine is so white? Why is that? At what point may we be proud again? Isn’t it racist to shame a group of people over their skin color? What percentage of the population needs to be non-white before we can join your ethnically diverse pride parade?

Katz’s comments plainly stated that the goal was to re-engineer Maine’s ethnic composition into something more pleasing to progressive sensibilities. But he didn’t offer any clue as to how his quota system might work in practice. Instead, his bill would have created a new Cabinet-level “Office of New Mainers” to coordinate with other state agencies and nonprofit service providers to develop a strategic plan to attract more immigrants and integrate them into the workforce. That’s a classic swamp tactic: throw more money at bureaucrats and empower unelected paper-pushers to make substantive decisions with no accountability.

Not only is Maine too white, according to Katz, we’re also too old. The solution is to grow our population with immigrants who “have a lower median age” and “higher birth rates.”

Katz said the bill “isn’t a magic bullet,” but a “first step to proactively support immigrants.” The truth is that just about everything Katz was pushing for in LD 1492 has become a reality since Janet Mills became Governor, even without the new Cabinet position in place. Notably absent from Katz’s wish list was any provision for housing the non-citizen newcomers. But hey, how was Roger supposed to know that so many “new Mainers” would land unannounced on our doorstep over the past 6 years?

LD 1492 passed 87-58 in the Democrat-controlled House, and 26-7 in the Republican-controlled Senate (yes, you read that correctly) before dying on the appropriations table at the end of the session in 2018.

As a footnote to this chronology, let’s not forget former Speaker of the House Mark Eves of North Berwick, who was a candidate for Governor in the June 2018 Democrat primary won by Janet Mills. He famously told a room full of supporters in Lewiston that, “Maine’s whiteness is bad news.”

Take that, all you deplorable Franco-Americans who make up 25 percent of Maine’s population!

He went on to tell the far-left Maine Peoples Alliance crowd, “Maine is going to be in trouble if it can’t attract a more diverse population.”

One can just imagine a candidate for mayor of Baltimore telling a crowd that the city’s blackness is bad news, that the only hope is to entice more whites or Asians to settle there. Would that candidate get a pass (as Eves did from Maine’s lamestream media), or would he be rhetorically tarred and feathered before being run out of town on a rail, his political future in ashes?

What Is the Conservative Plan to End the Migrant Crisis?

So, where do we go from here? What’s the plan?

An estimated 350 migrants will be evicted from the Portland Expo on August 16th to make way for the Maine Celtics professional basketball team, which rents the facility as its home court.

Portland’s mayor Kate Snyder is begging Gov. Mills to support a proposal to move 600 migrants from Portland’s overcrowded shelters to “transitional housing” (college dormitories) 92 miles north of Portland in rural Unity, Maine. In a letter dated June 29th, Snyder told the Governor that if Unity is not available, “we ask you to call up the National Guard to stand up and operate an emergency shelter.”

Snyder’s letter to Gov. Mills came less than 24 hours after more than 100 of the 300 migrants residing at the Expo blocked rush-hour traffic on busy Park Avenue in downtown Portland on June 28th. The protestors demanded better housing and “culturally preferred” food. In talking to police, protestors said they would only stop disrupting the morning commute if Portland’s leaders came to talk with them. Of course, they came groveling in a matter of minutes.

So what’s next, Mayor Kate, after more busloads of migrants arrive in Portland in the weeks and months ahead? At what point do Portland and its politicians take responsibility for creating this humanitarian crisis? When will you desist from your campaign to offload your self-imposed burden on other Maine communities – and on every Maine taxpayer from Kittery to Fort Kent?

Portland City Manager Danielle West delivered exactly the wrong message after meeting with the protestors to hear their grievances:

“We need more help from our surrounding communities. We need more help from the state. We need more help from our federal government,” West said. “We don’t have solutions right now. We are working to try to find them.”

With those words, West just told tens of millions of people south of our southern border that Portland’s politicians are working overtime to secure whatever amount of tax revenue is required to take good care of anyone who lands on Maine’s doorstep – even if the newcomers’ first act on U.S. soil is to violate our immigration laws.

Instead of turning off the migrant magnet, West just re-charged it.

I’ve got news for Mayor Snyder and City Manager West: it’s time to grow up and sober up, ladies. You’re not spoiled teenagers anymore. You’re grown-ups now.

This is your mess. You clean it up.

Here are a few suggestions for your consideration going forward:

Ask Governor Mills to use her political clout with the Biden administration to demand that all pending asylum claims from applicants residing in Maine be immediately expedited for final disposition within the next 30 days. In fact, if Mills activates the National Guard to clean up your mess, those military personnel can be enlisted and trained to conduct the expedited reviews.

We know from experience over the past decade that upwards of 80 percent of asylum claims are bogus. Most of the “new Mainers” being housed and fed at taxpayer expense are economic immigrants who do not qualify for asylum. Let’s adjudicate their claims, and immediately deport those who flunk the exam. Once those migrants with illegitimate asylum claims are identified and processed for deportation, the resulting humanitarian crisis will be much more manageable.

Next, Portland city officials need to immediately rescind Portland’s harboring-haven ordinance, and lobby their state legislators to pass legislation cutting off state funding to any municipality that protects illegal immigrants from deportation. That would turn off another magnet.

And while they’re lobbying their woke legislative delegation, Snyder and West should ask them to support reasonable residency requirements – a minimum of six months or even a year in Maine – before newcomers can apply for welfare. That would shut down another powerful magnet.

I’m sure Snyder and West are familiar with the first law of holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Turn off the magnets. Stop digging. Do it now.

Lawrence Lockman served four terms in the Maine House of Representatives (2012-2020). He is Co-founder & President of the conservative non-profit Maine First Project. He may be reached at Larry@MaineFirstProject.org.