“We have been overwhelmed and
have responded valiantly. Now we need breathing room. Our city is maxed out
financially, physically, and emotionally.” – Former Lewiston Mayor Larry
Raymond
Several weeks ago I drew
attention to the plight of the highly-unusual African migrant destination of
Portland, Maine on The Third Rail podcast. It seems I wasn’t the only one whose
suspicions were raised by what has rapidly turned into a crisis, with the city
totally ill-equipped to deal with an influx of hundreds of Africans bussed-in
by Catholic Charities from San Antonio, Texas. Someone who I can only assume is
a local going under the name Concerned Citizen recently published a brilliant
piece on Medium entitled “Such a Disgrace: How Ethan
Strimling Betrayed the People of Portland” describing the
trainwreck in Vacationland’s largest city. I highly recommend it as a primer on
the situation, but of particular importance to us here are some pertinent
questions raised by the author:
As a matter of course, refugees
are typically less concerned with plotting a perfect 12,000-mile journey with
an indeterminate source of funds than with escaping persecution alive…In surely
one of the most peculiar quirks of modern mass migration, these Angolans and
Congolese had taken the circuitous route from central Africa to Brazil to
Ecuador to Mexico to San Antonio, Texas and finally Portland, Maine. This
amounts to a bare minimum of 11,264 miles traveled “as the crow flies,” and as
much of the route was by land, it was surely much more. As ostensible refugees,
this naturally begs a couple of questions, namely: how can they afford to travel
such distances with no income and just the clothes on their backs? How are they
able to plan such a logistically-demanding trip? Why do they have international
media and legal contacts?[1]
I took it upon myself to
attempt to answer these questions, and have discovered in an almost-perfect
analogue with what’s happening in Europe an existing support system and network
that appears to be funneling migrants to particular pre-determined locales for
reasons that will be discussed in the forthcoming pieces. The primary actors
and organizations, and their connections to what at first blush appears to be
an isolated incident but is anything but, will be revealed. Any treatment of
the conflagration of aliens spreading across the whole of the United States
must first start with a border so porous it might as well be non-existent,
though. As Adam Shaw reports:
The U.S. Border Patrol chief
testified Thursday that migrants from 52 countries have illegally crossed the
border this year as she described an agency “overwhelmed on a daily basis” by
the escalating crisis.“While
smugglers primarily target the Northern Triangle, family units from 52
countries have illegally crossed the southern border so far this year,” U.S.
Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost told the House Homeland Security Border
Security, Facilitation and Operations Subcommittee…“In just two weeks, more
than 740 individuals from African nations—primarily family units—have been
apprehended in Del Rio sector alone, compared to only 108 who crossed the
southern border in the first eight months of the fiscal year,” she said… Earlier
in her remarks, Provost said that she has had to move 40-60 percent of manpower
away from the border to process and care for nearly 435,000 families and
children who have traveled across the border this year.[2]
Senior FBI counter-terrorism
official Michael Steinbach testified before the House that the U.S. presently
lacks the capability to properly screen out terrorists from the ranks of the U.N.
refugee program—to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of illegals
flooding across the southern border. Perhaps an even graver biological threat
looms as well; as Brian Lonergan writes:
What would happen if we
encouraged and accepted seemingly infinite numbers of asylum seekers into
our communities? The results are coming in, and they’re not pretty…The
Democratic Republic of Congo is currently suffering through an Ebola epidemic
so bad that the World Health Organization is considering declaring an
international emergency there (my note: they did in fact end up declaring it an
international emergency). Normally, asylum seekers are subject to a health
check and quarantine if necessary before entering the U.S. However, Acting
Homeland Security Director Kevin McAleenan recently admitted that, because of
the overflow at the border, thousands of border crossers and illegal immigrants
are being released into the country every week without undergoing tests for
diseases. Given these factors, a potentially deadly outbreak of Ebola in the
United States seems almost inevitable.[3]
None of these issues are
treated with any concern by the ruling class, however. Old, white Maine needs migrants.
Ostensibly driven by Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling’s siren song and with bus
fare paid for by Catholic Charities, hundreds of Angolans and Congolese wound
their way north to an already over-burdened Portland and its ample social
services and benefits. This isn’t some aberration or accident, some one-off or
outlier. For starters, Randy Billings reports that:
Some of the migrants have said
that word had spread on the long and dangerous trail through
Latin America of a welcoming attitude in Maine’s largest city, along with
available social services and an existing African community.[4]
Indeed, immigrants accounted
for three-fourths of Portland’s recent population growth, the vast majority of
whom hailed from sub-Saharan Africa, though some came from the Middle East and
Eastern Europe. In 2013, Portland had the largest concentration of immigrants
in the state— nearly 10,000 or 15% of the population representing 80
nationalities.[5] That
number has risen dramatically in just six short years. Currently, 42% of
Portland’s and 40% of nearby Lewiston’s public school students are non-White,
as are almost half of both cities’ children under the age five. Lewiston’s
neighbor, Auburn, experienced a 400% growth in their English Language Learner student
population between 2000-2010. Lewiston’s immigrant and refugee population has
grown by over 330% since 2004.
[Lewiston] became a secondary
migration destination for Somalis after social service agencies relocated a few
families there in February 2001. Between 1982 and 2000, resettlement agencies
placed refugees, including 315 Somalis, in the Portland, Maine area. High rates
of rental housing occupancy in Portland led to the first relocations to
Lewiston. Somalis have a history of nomadism and maintain contact, often via
cell phone, with a large network of extended family, clan members, and friends.
More Somalis learned about Lewiston and were attracted by the quality of life
there, the low housing costs, good schools, safety and greater social control
of their children in the smaller town. Between February 2001 and August 2002
over 1,000 Somalis moved to Lewiston. Most of these early secondary migrants
came from Clarkston, Georgia, a suburb just outside Atlanta. By 2007, Somalis
were 6.5% of the population of Lewiston and had come to the city from all over
the United States and at least three other countries.[6]
One-in-six Lewiston residents
are now Somali and the consequences have been predictably disastrous, just as
they have been in other formerly high-trust cities across the country. As Brian
Lonergan writes:
How has the Minnesota
experiment fared? In the Minneapolis neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, dubbed
“Little Mogadishu,” violent crimes increased by more than 50 percent in 2018.
Law enforcement attributed the spike to Somali gang activity there. This is
just one of many unpleasant statistics of growing criminal activity in the
Minneapolis area. The Somali community in Minneapolis has also become a hotbed
of terrorist recruitment in the U.S. The FBI reported that 45 Somalis left
Minnesota to join al-Shabab or ISIS, both Islamic terrorist groups. In 2018 a
dozen more were arrested attempting to join ISIS. The experiments in [Maine and
Minnesota] not only have produced uninspiring results, they violate the
“without risk to the rest of the country” component of Justice Brandeis’
theory. Bad immigration policies cannot be contained within a city or state’s
boundaries. Their effects can touch all of us, as the noxious “sanctuary” trend
demonstrates.[7]
Remember: there is no connection
between increased crime in Lewiston and Somalis, the media
reminds us. In addition to the violence, foreign-born residents account for
most of Lewiston’s welfare costs.[8] FAIR
expands:
City officials said the influx
strained social services such as welfare, job training, and language classes.
Somalis make up a third of all tenants at the city’s largest public housing
complex. More than a quarter of the families on the waiting list for public
housing are Somali…The city has doubled its general assistance budget (which
provides food, housing, utilities, and medicine), has earmarked about one
percent of its budget for services for the Somalis, and has cobbled together
federal and state grants. Lewiston’s assistant city administrator said that the
property tax rate has now grown so high that every dollar spent must receive
careful scrutiny. Some recent press coverage has taken a more positive stance
toward the influx of Somali immigrants that is not justified by economic data.
Most notable is a Newsweek article that highlights the dramatic increase in
English language learners and the emergence of Somali-oriented businesses as
evidence that immigration had “saved” the town. A broader look at Lewiston’s
economic situation demonstrates that this is clearly not the case. In April
2008, the Maine Department of Labor issued a report finding that less than 10
percent of Somali immigrants to the town had stable employment, and that most
earned extremely low wages. About 30 percent find part-time employment, leaving
the majority without any type of job. The massive influx of cheap, unutilized
workers creates a golden opportunity for corporations that thirst for
opportunities to lower wages and exploit cheap labor, something that Newsweek
failed to mention in highlighting a business-oriented magazine’s designation of
Lewiston as a good place to do business. The drain on public coffers by Somali
immigrants in Lewiston is not a new issue in the state. Indeed, a study
conducted at Bates College reports that the influx of Somalis arriving in
Lewiston started because “Portland’s public housing…could not meet demand from
the newcomers.” Even by 2003, before the largest influxes, Somali immigrants
made up two-thirds of the Hillview public housing complex, Lewiston’s largest.
Somali immigration peaked in 2005, when Somali Bantu immigrants who tend to be
even less educated than their predecessors began settling in Lewiston.[9]
One misleading statistic
immigration advocates deploy is stating that immigrants are more well-educated
than the native population. In the context of Maine, despite the influx of
non-Western immigrants in recent decades, a large share of immigrants to Maine
still come from Canada—19.6% of its foreign-born population hails from Canada.
Another 24.6% come from Europe.[10] In
January 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Communities & Banking published a paper by Dickstein,
et al. echoing the same “findings” of their Coastal Enterprises, Inc. paper
from the year previous (to be discussed in an upcoming installment). The paper,
entitled “Immigrants: An Important Part of Maine’s Economic Development
Strategy,” concluded: “An increasingly diverse population in Maine will enhance
the state’s ability to attract talent and do business with the rest of the
nation and the world” because immigrants to Maine are “young, well-educated,
and motivated.”[11] The
numbers regarding the latter two claims contradict the authors’
assertions—non-citizens and “naturalized citizens” have a lower workforce
participation rate than native Mainers, and immigrants are almost twice as
likely as Mainers to have less than a high school diploma.
Immigrants to Maine, then, slot
cleanly into two strata: the highly-educated Canadians and Europeans, and the
cheap labor and ready votes imported from Somalia, Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere.
The failure to differentiate between the two is a tried-and-true tactic
employed to deliberately mislead the people. According to Rachel
Desgrosseilliers, Lewiston’s Somali influx has been a good thing because—like
the French-Canadians and Irish before them—they are filling an urgent labor
need. This, precisely, is what we do not know, considering all the mills are closing or are closed.
She then contradicts her kumbaya narrative by pointing out that, “It wasn’t
easy when the French Canadians arrived and the Irish had been here first. They
felt that we were coming to take their jobs and there were big battles on the
Main Street bridge and they threw each other in the river.”
Interesting—different ethnicities pitted in economic competition coming to
blows. Who could’ve foreseen that?
Nevertheless, the state’s
leadership continues to double-down on the “necessity” of importing thousands
of sub-Saharan Africans for both the economy and as a reflection of “our
values.” Congresswoman Chellie Pingree released the following statement in
response to Governor Janet Mills’ announcement that the state will allow an
influx of hundreds of African asylum-seekers who’ve flooded into Portland to
apply for General Assistance (GA):
Governor Mills’ decision to
expand general assistance funds statewide is pragmatic and a reflection of
Maine’s values. She has shown tremendous leadership in the face of this
humanitarian crisis—as have City of Portland officials and Mainers themselves.
When hundreds of people fleeing conflict arrived in Portland, the community
responded by opening their doors and donating thousands of dollars to support
their needs. With the oldest workforce in the nation and record low
unemployment, Maine cannot afford to turn away people who want to make a fresh
start here.[12]
Isn’t it odd that the supposed
boon to the economy these migrants represent needs such substantial funding and
taxpayer largesse? Congresswoman Pingree also announced the House
Appropriations Committee has released an “emergency supplemental spending
package,” which includes $60 million to support communities, like Portland,
which have “experienced a significant influx of asylum seekers.” Portland has
been hemorrhaging money for years; as Concerned Citizen explicates:
Two-thirds of the 1,000 people
receiving general assistance in Portland in January 2019 were asylum seekers.
In just the month of September 2018, Portland paid over $125,000 in General
Assistance aid to 273 asylum seekers. For Maine, a report published by the
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimated that the state and local
governments spent $41 million on services for individuals residing in the state
without legal permission. As reported in the Portland Press Herald, for the
first 11 months of fiscal year 2014, Portland provided roughly $3 million in
General Assistance to 522 households whose asylum applications were still
pending. That figure is an increase from 312 households and $1.8 million in
General Assistance expenditures in fiscal year 2013—and nearly triple fiscal
year 2011. Maine taxpayers spend more than $19 million a year for ESL (English
as a second language) instruction, an increase of more than 100 percent in just
10 years…The city has estimated a cost of approximately $1.4 million to provide
housing vouchers and other types of support to the migrants currently in the
Expo—and this is assuming no more arrive, which appears highly unlikely. At the
end of June, Portland city councilors already had to re-appropriate $2.6 million
in funds to provide General Assistance benefits for asylum seekers throughout
the city…Asylum seekers primarily from African countries constitute 90% of the
people living in city-run family and overflow shelters.[13]
35% of students in Portland
public schools speak a language other than English at home, according to the
school district. Difficulties with integration and finding translators for
often-obscure languages are just part of the problem. Driven primarily by
African immigration, the public school system of not just Portland but those of
other communities throughout the state must grapple with the ubiquitous
behavioral issues of the immigrant children—a phenomenon that the ACLU of
Maine, naturally, blames on racism. Nevertheless, despite Blacks comprising
just 3.1 percent of all Maine public school students, they represent 6.2
percent of in-school expulsions, 6.3 percent out-of-school suspensions, 6.5
percent of referrals to law enforcement, 8 percent of expulsions under zero
tolerance policies, and 18 percent of corporal punishments in school.[14] There
are other costs as well, continues Concerned Citizen:
Local and state officials say
that Maine will look very different by 2050. Southern Maine, according to the
State Planning Office, will become so urbanized that it will essentially be an extension
of Boston. 27% of the state’s major roads are in poor or mediocre condition,
and 33% of its bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally
obsolete. In spite of these serious issues and others such as the homelessness
and opioid epidemics, Governor Mills has decided to further relax restrictions
on General Assistance to allow more asylum-seekers to claim benefits from the
over-burdened state and a populace which already
has the third-highest tax burden in the country.[15]
Finally, regarding Portland’s
metamorphosis into San Francisco East, Concerned Citizen references a
2016 Salon piece:
Portland, Maine had the second
largest rise in rental rates in the U.S. Rents rose 17.4%, the median rent in
Portland rising to $1582, more than much larger Philadelphia and Chicago. With
many hundreds of new families relocating to the city every year, a housing
shortage has worsened, and the rent increases have driven the working class out
of town in droves. Portland’s vacancy rate is near zero. Meanwhile shelters for
the homeless are overflowing with citizens unable to compete with newcomers who
consider the $1600 rents cheap by their former standards. The city has been
struggling to come up with workable options to increase affordable housing
without impacting Portland’s “livability.” Meanwhile, as rents have increased
40% in the past five years, Mayor Ethan Strimling has acknowledged that there
was a $500 gap between what people make in Portland and what they can afford to
pay for housing.[16]
In lieu of addressing the real problems affecting the people of
Portland, however, Strimling has apparently decided to exacerbate those
problems by fully committing to the globalist agenda, a decision backed and
aided by Governor Mills and Congresswoman Pingree and cloaked by the usual
platitudes extoling diversity, appealing to “our values,” and claiming
“economic necessity.” As we shall see in the forthcoming pieces, this goes much
deeper than just a few state officials or the odd virtue-signaling do-gooder organization,
however—there is a powerful global matrix of venture capitalists and financial
institutions, corporations, NGOs, media conglomerates, politicians,
academicians, law firms and assorted legal organizations and advocacy groups,
foreign governments, and ethnic lobbies all collaborating to further the
neo-liberal project.
The situation in Maine serves as a
microcosm of the dismantling of the Western world more broadly; I could have
just as easily picked any state in the country—or any other country outside the
former Eastern Bloc for that matter—and uncovered the same principal actors or
archetypes. This exercise will show in explicit terms, however, the mechanisms
and avenues through which the globalist establishment works to undermine our
sovereignty in the name of profit and racial animus.
Notes
[1] https://medium.com/@concernedcitizenisconcerned/such-a-disgrace-how-ethan-strimling-betrayed-the-people-of-portland-71d1cc27d4af
[2] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/illegal-immigrants-from-52-countries-crossed-u-s-mexico-border-this-year-top-official-says
[5] Miriam
Burt, Evaluation of the Adult English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)
Program in Portland Public Schools, (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2015).
[6] Mott,
Tamara E. (Feb 2010). “African refugee resettlement in the US: the role and
significance of voluntary agencies”. Journal of Cultural Geography. 27 (1): 1–31. doi:10.1080/08873631003593190 –
via MasterFILE Elite. AND Nadeau, Phil (Summer 2007). “The New Mainers: State
and local agencies form partnerships to help Somali immigrants”. National Civic Review. 96 (2): 55–57 AND Huisman,
Kimberly A.; Hough, Mazie; Langellier, Kristin M.; Toner, Carol Nordstrom, eds.
(2011). Somalis
in Maine: Crossing Cultural Currents. Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books. pp. 23–56.
[11] https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/communities-and-banking/2017/winter/immigrants-an-important-part-of-maines-economic-development-strategy.aspx#ft
[13] https://medium.com/@concernedcitizenisconcerned/such-a-disgrace-how-ethan-strimling-betrayed-the-people-of-portland-71d1cc27d4af
[15] https://medium.com/@concernedcitizenisconcerned/such-a-disgrace-how-ethan-strimling-betrayed-the-people-of-portland-71d1cc27d4af
[16]https://www.salon.com/2016/06/17/5_surprising_cities_where_gentrification_is_displacing_the_poor_partner/
(Republished from The Occidental Observer by
permission of author or representative)