As illegal aliens swamp the country, Maine may provide the model for the proper response: let each municipality decide whether to support them, or not
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On the day of her inauguration, Governor Janet Mills ordered that the state highway signs carrying her predecessor’s message “Maine — Open for Business” be changed to one that “welcomes all the new faces, all the people from around the world”.
Since the start of the Biden administration, migrants have flowed into the U.S. in record numbers, with 3,463,430 migrants encountered at the southern border between January 2021 and August 2022, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The high number of migrants entering the country are taxing the U.S. asylum system by increasing wait times and forcing cities and states to take on the burden of supporting them.
Once in the country, migrants wait around five to seven years for asylum cases to be fully adjudicated and appeals add additional time, The NYT reported.
The federal government also cannot provide adequate care to support the humanitarian needs of the migrants, who wait about a year to be able to work in the U.S., according to the NYT. There is no funding, like there is for refugees, to support the migrants seeking asylum at the federal level and the burden is then handed to cities and states.
Cities like Portland, Maine, have experienced parts of the issue because the state provides many public benefits to asylum seekers. The benefits include medical care and housing through the Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Since January 2021, over 700 asylum-seeking families have gone to Portland.
In May, the city of Portland said shelter capacity was full and that the housing program was no longer guaranteed, according to The NYT. The city later funded more housing to the tune of $9 million, which raised property taxes by 4.8% on residents.
The plan included housing for 140 families seeking asylum, as well as temporary shelter for 280 homeless adults.
“The community is growing so big that the word is traveling that we are helping. So more people are coming,” Mike Guthrie, the director of Portland’s family shelter, according to the NYT.
It’s Maine’s municipalities that must fund all this largess, and Portland is the prefect place to send the wretched refuse of the world’s teeming shores. The state’s largest city, it has a population of 68,000, and a citizenry very bit as woke as its namesake out west. They pass many of their laws by referendum, placed on the ballot via petition. In just the past four years, the wokes have imposed rent control, thereby stopping the renovation of the older, deteriorating housing stock and keeping it affordable for musicians, baristas and college students alike, a $22 minimum wage for those same baristas and co-op workers, mandatory energy-retrofitting of homes and so on. Fourteen new proposals are on this November’s ballot, all of which are expected to pass.
All of which describes a population that is willing to pay the cost of their Democratic Party’s generosity. A 4.8% property tax increase, imposed specifically to pay for housing for illegal immigrants would, in many less progressive cities awaken howls of outrage. Not so in Portland, where the resident liberals gulp, and then pay up and stay silent, too ashamed to expose their racist, xenophobic attitudes to their peers.
And God bless them. They’re already paying huge new costs to pay for schooling the children of these non-English speakers, building a new 280-bed homeless shelter for the bums they’re drawing from the northernmost regions of Maine and the southern tip of Florida, and are calling for still more immigrants. Feel free to grant them their wishes, good and hard.
