Rep. Lawrence Lockman’s Sept. 4 BDN OpEd about Maine’s “dangerous experiment with open borders” is a towering example of ignorance. His entire argument is predicated on the assumption that immigrants are a threat and a drain on Maine’s resources. The truth is quite the opposite.
As psychologist Mary Pipher observed, immigrants bring us gifts in the form of their cultures and experiences. They bring gifts in the form of new perspectives. They bring strength.
“We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs,” Pipher says. “We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America.”
For the past year, our organization, Oral History and Folklife Research, has been engaged in an oral history project, “ Immigrant Voices,” conducting interviews with immigrants from numerous countries, who have come to Maine at differing points in their lives and different points in history. The narrators in the project have come from Somalia, France, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Burundi and Ghana. Some fled war, civil unrest or unbearable conditions; some came for the opportunities to be found in America. We have heard moving stories of incredible survival and strength; stories of educational aspirations and a willingness to contribute to communities no matter what blows have been dealt in the past.
In talking about my work in oral history, I sometimes tell people one of the best things about my work is the people I get to meet. Makara Meng survived the killing fields of Cambodia, suffering unspeakable horrors in a Khmer Rouge labor camp as a small child. She lost all but one member of her extended family. Only her mother survived with her, yet there was no bitterness or anger as she narrated her story.
Today, after operating a grocery store in Portland for several years, she teaches her son the value of helping others and volunteers in her South Portland community. Leaving my interview with Meng, I could not help but feel my perspective was altered forever. Hearing her story has made me examine some of my own contributions to my community.
Parivash Rohani saw her family’s home burned down in the 1979 Iranian revolution. She fled first to India and studied engineering, then immigrated to the United States. She could not use her engineering skills here, so she studied nursing and now uses those skills to heal the sick.
Fouad Abdullah fled Iraq when radical extremists posed a threat to his family. He now represents Maine in table tennis tournaments, winning championships. He spends many hours teaching young players to excel in the sport. His greatest ambition, he told me, was to teach Americans to love table tennis. (Now there’s a threat for you.)
Similarly, Pious Ali began working with youth in Portland after immigrating from Ghana — an effort he says has taught him the virtue of patience. Ali now serves on Portland’s school board, and he is vying for a seat on the Portland City Council.
There have always been nativist voices in this country, with two prominent examples being the aptly named Know-Nothing’s of the 1840s and 1850s, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Here in our state, I have personally encountered one tale of Ku Klux Klan efforts to intimidate Irish Catholic communities, and of course there are many other such stories from Franco and Irish families in Maine. Some of my ancestors likely heard the refrain, “No Irish need apply,” when they arrived in America. Those nativist voices have over and over been proven just simply wrong.
Some 400 years ago, William Shakespeare, collaborating with playwright Anthony Munday to write “The Book of Sir Thomas More,” asked his contemporaries to imagine themselves banished to a foreign land where they were strangers: “would you be pleased / To find a nation of such barbarous temper / That breaking out in hideous violence / Would not afford you an abode on earth / Whet their detested knives against your throats / Spurn you like dogs and the like as if that God / Owed not nor made not you … what would you think to be used thus? / This is the stranger’s case / And this your mountainous inhumanity.”
Just as Shakespeare suggested centuries ago, we are well served to place ourselves in the shoes of others before we condemn. We should welcome the stranger and his or her gifts to our communities.
Keith Ludden is the director of Oral History and Folklife Research Inc. in Augusta.