Lawrence Lockman of Bradley served four terms in the Maine House of Representatives, from 2012 to 2020. He is co-founder and President of the conservative non-profit Maine First Project. He may be reached at larrylockman22@gmail.com.
We know people are smoking crack at the White House — but now we have to wonder, is someone smoking crack at the Blaine House too?
What else would explain Gov. Janet Mills’ announcement on August 2nd that she wants to encourage 75,000 MORE immigrants to settle here over the next five years? That’s more than the total population of Portland — by far Maine’s largest city.
Anyone who’s not delusional or malevolent or stoned understands that Maine is in the grip of an unprecedented demographic and humanitarian crisis. The question before us is this: Which of the adjectives above best describes our Governor?
Maine is already well past the breaking point of taxpayers’ ability to provide free housing, food, education, and medical care to thousands of unskilled, non-English-speaking immigrants who arrived here unannounced over the past four years after crashing the wide-open southern border in Texas. They’re now arriving at a rate of about 3,000 per year, having long since overwhelmed homeless shelters and hotels in the greater Portland area and beyond, at a cost to state and local taxpayers in the tens of millions of dollars.
Simply put, we have no place to house the thousands of immigrants who have arrived since Janet Mills took office.
Given that reality, a sober Governor with sober advisors would hit the pause button and take steps to discourage immigrants from heading to Maine after they breach the southern border. With barely 3,000 housing units available statewide in this extremely tight real estate and rental market, that’s what a prudent chief executive would do.
But sober thinking and prudence aren’t among Janet’s strong suits.
Rather than tapping the brakes, Mills is mashing down on the accelerator. The executive order directs her staff to develop and deliver to her by January 19, 2025, a plan to establish a state “Office of New Americans.” She told the Portland Press Herald she hopes the plan will attract 15,000 “New Mainers” per year over five years – a breathtaking 500 percent annual increase over current levels of in-migration.
We’ve been told over and over again that these non-citizen newcomers are the answer to Maine’s chronic workforce shortage. But even if all of the “new Mainers” go to work tomorrow, does anyone seriously believe the taxes they would pay will ever offset the cost of the freebies they have already consumed since they began arriving in Maine by the hundreds, then by the thousands since Mills’ first year in office?
For example, immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who identify as “asylum seekers” were given first-in-line preference for the 52 new apartment units constructed in South Portland by Avesta Housing Development Corporation. When the project was completed in February, more than 1,000 applications for the apartments poured in, but it was tough luck for life-long Mainers languishing on affordable housing waitlists. All those homeless veterans, the elderly, and people with disabilities living in crappy, cramped apartments were shoved to the back of the waitlist line (again) to make way for non-citizen border-crashers who have never paid a dime in Maine taxes.
To add insult to injury, Maine taxpayers will pick up the tab for the first two years of rent on the new West End apartment units in South Portland, thanks to emergency funding from the Legislature that had Republican fingerprints all over it.
By the way, Avesta is a government-funded “non-profit” that pays its CEO over $230K annually.
Members of Maine’s sprawling Nanny State Non-Profit Industrial Complex will be cheering all the way to the bank – with their snouts buried in the public trough – if Mills’ executive order leads to the creation and funding of a new state office to accelerate in-migration when the Legislature reconvenes in January. That’s exactly what 80 non-profit organizations (yes, count ‘em, 80) were clamoring for in May of last year: “a permanent state office to assist in the resettlement of asylum seekers.”
As for the workforce shortage, bear in mind that the politicians bleating about the need to import foreign labor to fill job vacancies in Maine are some of the same politicians who have made Maine famous for our lousy business climate. The income and property tax burden, combined with high energy costs and workers’ comp premiums, have been a huge drag on job creation for decades. That’s why our children and grandchildren are Maine’s biggest and most valuable exports.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Thirty years ago, there were more than 8,000 mill jobs in the Penobscot Valley between Bucksport and Millinocket. I know because I had one, at the Passadumkeag stud mill. Those were good jobs with good wages and good benefits. Every mill job generated at least three jobs outside the mills: loggers, truckers, foresters, diesel mechanics, parts and equipment suppliers, restaurant employees, food wholesalers, etc., etc., etc.
All of those mill jobs are gone today, along with the multiple thousands of spin-off jobs they generated. The mill closures have rendered once-prosperous communities in the Penobscot Valley and beyond ghost towns. Paper is still manufactured in the United States, but not so much in Maine, thanks in large measure to state government’s half-century of inflicting the death of a thousand cuts on businesses large and small.
When the Old Town mill twelve miles north of Bangor on the banks of the Penobscot re-started in 2019 after a four-year shutdown, the new owners advertised to fill 130 positions. More than 1,000 people applied for those jobs.
Doesn’t sound like a workforce shortage to me.
Alas, the new owners shut the Old Town mill down again in March of this year, after investing $200 million in the facility, citing high energy costs as among the factors prompting the shutdown.
If the mill re-starts again (not likely given the energy policies championed by the Governor), the last thing Mainers want is a much larger labor pool competing for those jobs. You don’t need a PhD in economics to figure out that wages will be driven down significantly if you double or triple the number of people applying for a limited number of jobs.
Bottom line: Janet Mills’ claim that we need 75,000 more immigrants to strengthen our hollowed-out workforce is fraudulent.
So, what is her motivation?
At this point I believe we need to discard the tiresome admonition that we must never, ever impugn the motives of our political adversaries. Frankly, that prohibition has always been a one-way street for self-styled “progressives” who gleefully and habitually malign conservatives as racists, bigots, and Nazi sympathizers.
So let’s speak truth to power: Janet Mills’ plan to spray gasoline on the fire of Maine’s illegal immigration crisis is beyond stupid and irrational. It’s dangerous and demented, even if she’s perfectly sober and hasn’t smoked any crack lately.
The only options I can think of to explain this behavior are limited to these three: she is either (1) stupid, (2) stoned, or (3) malevolent.
I don’t think she’s stupid or stoned. I vote for option #3, malevolent, defined as “wishing evil or harm to another or others; showing ill will; ill-disposed; malicious.”
I don’t know how else to describe a Governor who would intentionally put the interests of ungrateful, law-breaking foreigners ahead of the well-being of Maine citizens. Come on, Janet, is the cheap-labor lobby that powerful?
When a mob of 100 foreign nationals housed at the Portland Expo blockaded rush-hour traffic on June 28th to complain about the quality of the free food and housing provided by hard-pressed Maine taxpayers, there were no arrests, and not a peep of condemnation from the Governor’s office. Instead, the city’s elected officials rushed to the scene to negotiate with the mob’s leaders, who demanded “culturally appropriate” food, improved shower facilities, and more comfortable cots.
Six weeks later, Gov. Mills unveiled her plan to invite tens of thousands of the mob’s compatriots to come hither over the next five years.
Mills took sides with the lawbreakers against the interests of Maine people. Why would she do that?
My theory: Janet is nothing more than an unreconstructed 1960s radical who drank the progressive Kool-Aid a long time ago. She subscribes to the Leftist narrative that Maine and America are systemically racist bastions of white privilege, the same neo-Marxist nonsense her state Department of Education is pushing Maine’s K-12 public schools to incorporate into classroom instruction.
If Mills were honest, she would tell us right straight up that she agrees with the Maine Immigrant and Legal Advocacy Project that Maine’s current plight is the result of “a racist and xenophobic immigration system that disproportionately harms Black, Brown, and marginalized immigrants.”
The Mills plan is for Maine to have a huge pool of publicly subsidized cheap labor for corporate employers, at a cost to taxpayers that defies calculation. As an added benefit, the planned resettlement of another 75,000 foreign nationals here will enhance the progressive trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as life-long Mainers who happen to be poor and white will be shoved to the back of the line to make way for oppressed Third World immigrants who happen to be poor and black.
What better way to atone for our collective sins against disadvantaged, marginalized communities than to divert scarce resources from privileged “old Mainers” to virtuous “new Mainers”?
Rational Mainers who aren’t stoned and have IQs above room temperature have their work cut out for them. If they want to derail Mills’ juggernaut before it reaches critical mass, they will need to exert maximum pressure on state legislators between now and the end of January and beyond.
Otherwise, it’s lights out on liberty in the late, great state of Maine.
To read this article on The Maine Wire website, click here.