And the Mayor of Lewiston, Maine was invited for the all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC to report presumably on how swimmingly “receiving community” Lewiston is handling their Somali population overload.

In a letter from the Mayor, the Mayor demonstrated his either complete naivete about the Center for American Progress, a George Soros spawn, or he is an out-of-the-closet far left progressive himself.

In early November, I was contacted by representatives of the Center for American Progress and invited to attend (at their expense) a Receiving Community Roundtable in Washington, D.C. on December 14 and 15, 2010. I did attend last week.

Let me first tell you about the Center for American Progress (CAP). According to its website, it “is dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and actions. ‘Building on the achievements of progressive pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, (their) work addresses 21st century challenges such as energy, national security, economic growth and opportunity, immigration, education, and healthcare.’ They develop new policy ideas, critique the policy that stems from conservative values, and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter and shape the national debate.”

The Center was founded in 2003 to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement. CAP is headed by its founder John D. Podesta and based in Washington, D.C. They opened another office in Los Angeles in 2007. Podesta has grown this organization from an eight-person policy operation into an organization consisting of 180 full-time employees. John Podesta served as Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from October 1998 until January 2001.

The mayor and his staff obviously had the politically-correct verbiage down well enough that they got an invite and a paid trip to DC.   These Alinskyites, like Podesta, are so good at what they do!

Deputy City Administrator Phil Nadeau and I spent over a half-hour holding a conference call with CAP to tell them of our story of refugee and secondary migration here in Lewiston and Auburn. This is when I received the invitation to attend the Receiving Community Roundtable.

This was followed up by a pre-roundtable “homework” assignment that I completed with the assistance of Phil Nadeau and Sue Charron, director of Lewiston’s Social Services. We wrote up our story and submitted it to CAP, as did all the other 55 participants who came together for the December Roundtable.

[….]

The 55 participants included elected officials, service providers, professors, demographers, social scientists, anthropologists, social psychologists, political scientists, religious leaders, think tank representatives and so on. [You can bet there were no critics of more immigration to America, just talk of how to get along in the ol’ melting pot and how to keep the negative stories out of the media.]

The mayor also learned there were “hundreds” of receiving communities just like his having problems.

Let’s address the “tension” so we can move ahead with amnesty and open borders (that’s what CAP is after).

This roundtable program was designed to address the sources of immigrant-native tension and native anxiety in communities, especially where demographic changes are occurring rapidly, and to figure out ways to calm the high emotions so that we can live and work together and push Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Yippee!  A tool kit, let’s all cheer for a tool kit!  That will quiet the tensions and shut up the critics, you betcha!

As a result of all the input from this large diverse group, a writer has been commissioned to develop a report that will come out in the spring of 2011. From that report, a “Tool Kit” for receiving communities will be developed. When I receive that report, I will share its contents with you.

For more on the Center for American Progress, see this post about how they wanted Obama to airlift 100,000 Iraqis to the US, or this one where CAP is a leader in the gang of one-worlders, and here is CAP’s head honcho Podesta in the middle of the ACORN scandal.

And, for more on Lewiston, just type Lewiston into our search function and you will get dozens of posts about the on-going tension there.

P.S.  I should have mentioned that the mayor did complain to CAP that Lewiston didn’t have enough money to handle all their immigrant-related problems.