Gov. Janet Mills, the liberal governor of Maine, has issued an executive order creating a new state office with the Orwellian title of “Office of New Americans.” The new bureau will have the goal of attracting 75,000 migrants to live and work in Maine by 2029. These “new Mainers” would increase the overall population of Maine by 5 percent. They would exceed the population of even Maine’s largest city, Portland, whose population numbers 68,408.
The state currently hosts about 50,000 foreign-born, according to estimates from the American Immigration Council, though that figure may be low. At least 10,000 of those are natives of Somalia who in recent years settled in the city of Lewiston and have since been responsible for numerous episodes of violent attacks on Maine citizens.
Elsewhere, during Mills’s tenure, thousands of migrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Haiti have settled in southern Maine. Their resettlement was initially financed by the federal government, but now the federal funds have run out. The migrants, many of whom remain homeless, have become wards of the state government. Most speak little English and have little money, and they can hardly be regarded as–in Mills’s words–“a vital part of our state’s communities and economy.”
For that reason, critics, such as the independent news site, The Maine Wire, have called the governor’s plan “ludicrous.” It would, according to the Wire
. . bring 150 percent more migrants to Maine in a quarter of the time it took the first 50,000 to arrive. It’s a vast re-settlement operation to consider for an administration that has struggled mightily to find a humane way to deal with the 5,000-10,000 migrants that have arrived unexpectedly in Maine since 2019. How will this be accomplished in a state that can barely manage payroll systems, can’t keep its nursing homes open, has thousands of disabled residents on waitlists for MaineCare coverage, has schools with plummeting test scores, has crumbling infrastructure it can barely maintain, and sometimes struggles to pay its school lunch ladies on time?
All those factors add up to a grim reality, yet to ultra-libs like Mills, reality always takes a backseat to ideology.
For more, see The Maine Wire.