PORTLAND, Maine — Former Maine Attorney General James Tierney told a Portland audience Tuesday evening that the state’s economy will depend on its ability to attract — and accommodate — newcomers from foreign countries.
“We are so old that we have got to attract people to come to Maine from someplace else. I don’t care what color they are, I just want them to come here,” Tierney said. “We’re not talking about affirmative action, we’re not talking about doing people favors. We’re talking about doing ourselves a favor if we can figure out this diversity issue.”
Tierney joined Eva Millona, a former Albanian judge and executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, as keynote speakers in a panel discussion about economic growth and immigration.
The talk was the first in a series of five such public discussions scheduled for Portland through June, and comes against a backdrop of a dispute between city officials and Gov. Paul LePage over the distribution of aid money to undocumented immigrants.
LePage has declared that no General Assistance should be given to undocumented immigrants, and has withheld state reimbursements to Portland and other municipalities that have continued to disburse the money to noncitizens seeking asylum.
That dispute is playing out in the court system and wasn’t referenced directly by Tierney or Millona in their keynote remarks.
But Millona highlighted immigrant integration programs that have been successful around the country, and said Maine cities should invest in programs that attract immigrants, as well as provide them with business and entrepreneurship training.
Millona said Portland’s “immigrant population and immigrant workforce … has increased by almost 30 percent in past decade.” That figure was paired with a statistic — shown as part of a slideshow projected onto a movie screen before the event — that immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start their own businesses than native-born U.S. citizens.
“If immigrants succeed, we all benefit,” said opening speaker Tim Honey, president of the World Affairs Council of Maine. “If immigrants don’t, we all pay the price.”
Portland Mayor Michael Brennan told the story of his grandmother, an Irish immigrant with a sixth-grade education who came to the city in the early 1900s, and pointed out that nearly everyone in the city can trace his or her roots back to immigrants.
“We are what we are today as Portland because we’ve accepted diversity and we’ve actively had people come here from all over the world,” he said. “We’ll be the city of tomorrow depending on how well we welcome and create opportunities for people from all over the world.”
Tierney said that Maine’s aging population represents an economic crisis, and the state’s only chance to avoid economic ruin will be to welcome immigrants to replenish its population.
The state’s median age of 43.9 years old is the oldest in the country. In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau found that Maine’s deaths outnumbered its births for the first time in recent history, feeding concerns that as the state’s large population of baby boomers retires, there won’t be enough young people to replace them in the workforce.
Tierney said that even if Maine passed a law requiring people of traditional child-rearing ages to stay in the state and have children, the state wouldn’t be able to replace the retiring baby boomers in the workforce.
“We do not have enough people [between the ages of 18 and 44] to birth our way out of this problem,” he said.
“We are no longer a state with people looking for jobs, we’re a state with jobs looking for people,” Tierney said. “We have jobs in this state, which we’re losing because we do not have people to fill them. We don’t see the connection between the economic development piece and our lack of diversity.”
The former attorney general said Mainers must reject the “politics of fear” and embrace programs that create opportunities for immigrants.
“[Newcomers to Maine’s workforce] are not going to look like me,” Tierney said. “They’re not going to have names like Tierney, Brennan, Monahan or Flanagan, and we’d better get used to it. That’s a good thing.”
Joining Tierney and Millona in the panel discussion were Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce CEO Chris Hall, Damas Rugaba of the New Mainers Integration Center and Richard Berman of the Portland-based Developers Collaborative.
Tuesday’s talk was hosted by the World Affairs Council of Maine alongside the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition. The next event in the five-discussion series will take place on Feb. 25 at the Portland Public Library. A report on potential immigrant integration strategies resulting from the talks will be prepared for the fifth event in the series, to be held on June 8 at the Ocean Gateway, Honey said.
