To take Victoria Hugo-Vidal’s arguments seriously, immigration is so magical it can suspend the rules of economics; supply and demand do not apply when new Mainers are present. That, of course, is absurd: The flood of immigrants needing housing, medical care and welfare cannot help but increase the cost of housing and public services, driving down wages and driving up taxes.

Uncontrolled mass immigration has put working-class Mainers in a quadruple vice: housing availability goes down, costs go up, wages go down and taxes go up. Contrary to all the airy rhetoric from immigration boosters, immigration brings nothing but trouble to working families.

To be sure, the owners of capital – landlords, large corporations, low-wage businesses – all benefit from having new mobs of needy clients and cheap labor. Those benefits, for them, are privatized while the financial and social costs are paid by low- and middle-class Mainers.

The state is importing a diversity from which there is no benefit. Certainly, one can allow that wealthy white women, living in the nondiverse environs of the Blaine House or Falmouth, enjoy a frisson of moral preening by patting these new Mainers on the head, just as long as that diversity stays in Portland and Lewiston.

No one voted for an open border or to dump foreigners in our communities. Now, without being asked, Mainers must deal with the lasting problems of housing shortages, low wages, congestion, social rancor and deracination.

Charles Day
Arundel

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