We want more immigrants in Maine and in America because Thomas Jefferson said that’s good for America! (Or I think he did! Well, sort of!). King opened a floor speech last week with words from Jefferson that frankly I read three or four times and couldn’t figure out how the words fit today’s immigration situation, especially when one considers the large number of Muslim immigrants entering the US and Maine.
Indeed Jefferson, of all people, knew what violence Muslims were capable of. He would never have ‘welcomed’ Muslims to America, but maybe King doesn’t know about the Barbary Wars.
Here are a couple of excerpts from King’s speech on S.744:
Does this discussion affect the State of Maine? Well, yes, it does. We have migrants and immigrants picking our crops in northern Maine, blueberries and potatoes and broccoli. We have a vibrant refugee and asylum-seeking community in Portland, ME, and in Lewiston. Many of those from Africa come here with very different cultures. We have 52 languages spoken in the Portland public schools. Yes, we have strains and difficulties adjusting one culture to another. But we are making it work and it is making our State richer spiritually, culturally, intellectually, and, yes, financially. It is working. [Readers: Type Lewiston into our search function to see how it’s working!—ed]
King: We need more immigrants because the white birthrate is declining, and so we need to speed up the decline of America as we know it by allowing the Third World to enter in a speedier manner! Heck! Might as well get it over with sooner than later!
We are living in a negative demographic time bomb. Last year, I believe for the first time in American history, we had more deaths than births of White Americans. One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to know if that continues, we will shrink and shrivel as a society. We need immigration to add to our population, to add to the ideas and creativity.
[…..]
Immigrants are always going to be different and a little scary, and that has been true throughout American history.
Read the whole speech. It is the usual blah, blah, blah….but read it anyway! By the way, King says this is the job he has been preparing for throughout his entire life, here.
Then below is a report from some readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch who visited a staff member in King’s office the following day.
We need to take in Syrian refugees!
The speech was on Thursday. On Friday we visited with a Senator King aide who is paid $73,000 per year and who works on immigration issues. We were there to discuss the 24-pound Immigration bill, S. 744. The aide did give us a lot of time and we discussed many points. The below points may be of particular interest to readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch and to those in Maine.
The aide, on his own, blurted out, without any question or provocation from us, that whenever “we [America] invade a country or create a war and chaos, we need to take in refugees from that country. We need to take in Syrian refugees. We need to take in Iraqi and Afghan refugees.”
[I didn’t think we had gone to war in Syria yet, but I guess I’m quibbling! We did send arms through Benghazi earlier and we are promising more weapons to the rebels real soon, so I guess that means, at least in the mind of King’s staffer, that the refugees are ours!—ed]
Later, in response to one of our group suggesting that her experiences in the Middle East indicated that Muslim and Arabic culture are just too different and should not be allowed into the USA, the aide responded “that is exactly the same argument that was used against the Catholics 100 years ago.” One assumes that the aide does not foresee within the Muslim refugee and immigrant population the possibility of an embedded catastrophic problem. The aide had no response when recent events in Boston, the World Trade center and other places were mentioned.
Go here to learn more about the Portland Somali rapist.
The problem King has here (was the speech written by this staffer?), by using emotional arguments and platitudes to make his point, is that for every appealing “creative” blueberry picking immigrant, I can find him an immigrant criminal, a terrorist or a welfare mooch, or an immigration advocate in the Chamber of Commerce looking for cheap blueberry-picking labor!