At the Portland Community Chamber breakfast in May, Gov. Paul LePage spoke as a self-described “bipartisan” governor fighting Democrats who espouse “liberal ideology” and support government welfare fraud and waste. It is part of a crass, destined-to-fail re-election campaign.
The most recent example is this month’s effort to convince Mainers that immigrants are a metastasizing “illegal” cancer plaguing the welfare of America’s least diverse and most elderly state.
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about the author
Ralph J. Carmona of Portland is a regent emeritus of the University of California and an adjunct professor at Southern Maine Community College.
Federal immigration enforcement is a complex mess. Almost 70 percent of Americans support comprehensive path-to-citizenship federal reform legislation for undocumented immigrants.
LePage’s “illegal immigrant” ruling, however, is not about enforcement or reform. It represents a wasteful government pattern of anachronistic rhetoric used to energize the tea party base of both this state’s and the nation’s Republican Party.
The governor’s hostility mirrors a national tea party anti-diversity narrative. Having survived a brutal and violent ethnic upbringing, LePage has undergone a political evolution that involves using his past to justify anti-immigrant policies. Think of those blacks who mimic right-wing talk show profiles of President Obama as an un-American Muslim socialist. Remember when the governor claimed an “adopted” black son following controversial remarks about the NAACP? Note how his unconstitutional government rule affects immigrants and makes them a LePage campaign pinata.
The tea party voter surge revealed itself this month in the Republican congressional primary defeats of Maine moderate Kevin Raye and immigrant-sensitive House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. So, what better way to boost a LePage turnout than a ratcheted-up flawed executive policy to weed out 1,000 “illegal aliens” invading Pine Tree State towns and cities? Why not spend taxpayer money for state and local public actions to stop these “un-American welfare intruders” infesting Maine culture?
But the November election will not be a repeat of the 2010 election. This election is a referendum on Gov. LePage. His low approval rating is proof positive that voters want him out. One indicator that voters will turn out decisively against LePage is a poll commissioned by the Press Herald last Sunday. Like previous polls, it reaffirms that if Mainers had to vote today, they would vote for Democrat Mike Michaud – not independent candidate Eliot Cutler. Voters still know little about latter, even though he almost won in 2010. They know a lot more about Michaud and LePage’s base-driven politics, but common sense dictates they remain undecided until after September.
Much can change between now and Election Day, but candidate campaign narratives drive emotions and thoughts. A key tea party counternarrative is that many Maine moderate, even conservative, voters are appalled by the governor’s public behavior.
To better understand why Maine voters will turn out against LePage is to acknowledge language like his most recent “illegality” coded words are intended to criminalize immigrants. Thoughtful voters know that noncitizens without documents, like past Maine immigrants, are not thugs but human beings struggling in economic circumstances of no choice. Many exemplify one of my college students – an undocumented immigrant profiled by Sen. Dick Durbin on the U.S. Senate floor.
In fact, this immigration issue is about far less than 1 percent of Maine’s population disproportionately concentrated in urban cities like Portland. Those receiving General Assistance in Maine’s largest city are often impoverished African or Middle East immigrants legally seeking asylum or refuge from genocide.
Business leaders who view immigration as human capital key to Maine’s future success also see through LePage’s counterproductive actions. The reality that we are a nation and state of immigrants goes by the wayside with his pretensions that they are a threat to a Maine in need of population growth.
If Maine were Georgia or Alabama, LePage’s brutish language would have succeeded legislatively without this executive rule, which deputizes employees in cities like Portland as unfunded Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. What next in this governor’s government campaign? Be prepared for more tea party-like hostile executive rules, uncompromising health care posturing and wasteful welfare studies.
Supreme Court Justice William Douglas emphasized that America is tested by how we treat our most marginalized. When we “elevate the rights of the least of us,” he wrote, “we elevate the stature of all of us.” Utterly tone deaf to the spirit and letter of basic law, in this latest anti-immigrant executive action, LePage has once again proven to Maine voters that he is a national embarrassment.
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