On homelessness
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Migrants Arrive at US Border With Address of Portland, Maine Shelter
When speaking about the issue of large numbers of migrants coming to Maine, Portland Mayor Mark Dion told Matt Gagnon on WGAN Morning News Monday that migrants come to the U.S. border with the address of the city’s homeless shelter already in their cell phones.
Mayor Dion told Gagnon that Portland has seen a “whole different level of immigration” than in past decades, when immigrants would be met in the city by sponsoring families and were more readily assimilated.
Dion said that migrants having cell phones facilitates a “secondary migration to communities where they had relatives or contacts.”
“Today, that’s accomplished over cell phone — immediate, at the point of entry into the United States,” Dion said.
The Portland Mayor explained that a team the city had sent to the border were told by border officials that “many of the refugees already had the address to our shelter in Portland, because that level of communication was ongoing between themselves and people that had made their way here to the City of Portland, or one of the communities in the metro.”
[RELATED: Catholic Charities Maine Touts Taxpayer-Funded Migrant Resettlement Plans…]
Dion, advocating for the state to shoulder more responsibility in dealing with the migrant and homelessness crises, told Gagnon that “dealing with the unhoused is not a municipal issue, it’s a state responsibility.”
What the Mayor glides over is the Field of Dreams phenomenon, that states, “if you build it, they will come”. Portland built the most generous, welcoming town for illegal aliens in the state, so it shouldn’t surprise me that the word got out.
And this part of the interview caught my attention, because, surprisingly for a liberal, the mayor admits what “homeless advocates” in other cities deny:
Dion pushed back on the idea that the homeless population in Portland are victims of an “inadequate supply of homes or apartments,” and instead placed responsibility for homelessness primarily on fentanyl and substance use disorder.
“I think when you go into the encampments, or you deal with unhoused people generally, what’s driving their behavior, what’s driven them out into the street, has been a drug abuse issue — a substance use disorder out of control,” Dion said.
“The nature of their disorder has wiped away their ability to support themselves other than being out on the street,” he continued. “They’re not searching for an apartment, they’re searching for their next injection.”
So true.
