I’ve always treated them like people, without sharing the Italian aspiration of invading their homelands.
This might come as a shocker to socialists, but people of Somalian heritage living in Lewiston have just as much personal agency as people of Polish heritage do. The wars of our grandparents’ homelands don’t define what we’re doing here. I’m not even a Mainer, and there are now adult Mainers of Somalian heritage who graduated a few years behind my kid.
You can even see Somalians in MAGA hats occasionally in Lewiston, Maine. The first wave has been here longer than I have, all US citizens.
(For reference, the definition of “Mainer” is someone who was born and raised in Maine, everyone else is “From Away”.)
Of course war is stupid and Italy never should have invaded East Africa, even if they did end slavery which resulted in a few million people being freed. Haile Selassie is seen by some as a hero, or even a god, but he did not “officially” end slavery in Ethiopia until after the Italians left and he regained power (although the Italians had ended it when they invaded) and he himself owned slaves.
Italy just did what England, France, Spain and even the US had done before them. What many nations had been doing. This doesn’t make any of it right of course.
For anyone curious, I just had a conversation about the potential impacts of federal deportation efforts in Maine with someone who is involved with the process.
In a state of 1.2 million, there are roughly 15,000 known people who are in some stage of immigration courts that now, with the law being enforced, are likely to end up being deported.
It is UNKNOWN how many people have shown up in Maine over the last several years and have not yet entered the immigration court system, but the number is likely much higher given the total lack of enforcement.
The lack of enforcement was 100 percent a calculated move done very deliberately. As if that wasn’t already obvious.
I think the scale of this is quite a bit bigger than any government source has acknowledged. Lewiston is a town of 40,000 people (officially), and 1/3 of our public school students do not speak English.
I don’t think we’re the only town in Maine with similar numbers, but the numbers are often very hard to get. I came across mine by watching school board meetings.
When all of the facts come to light, this may go down as the Democrats’ most shameful political ploy since slavery.
Have you tried to look at the number of students to see if it agrees with the size of the population?
Given that slavery in the US preceded it becoming the US and that some of the Founders were members of the Democratic-Republican party (like Jefferson, who owned slaves) both parties can share that shame.
The total number of students enrolled in LPS is about 6,000. I’m unsure if that is a normal number for a town of roughly 40k. Out of those 6k students, roughly half are Muslim, 1/3 speak little or no English, and we have an unusually high special education enrollment, all while having one of the highest cost per pupil in the nation.
I would assume that most English-speaking Muslims are my Somalian neighbors who’ve been here for 20 plus years.
Prior to their arrival, Lewiston was a fraction of a percent Muslim. I think my kid’s graduating class in 2018 was 30 percent.
What is evident from the numbers is the radical social transformation that’s taken place, given that the city’s population has remained stable throughout. It has been a process of driving the good, productive people out and pumping in state dependents however they can be acquired.
Some end up being great neighbors, acquiring citizenship, etc, but the level of dysfunction this has introduced is mind-boggling to me.
It’s all quite sinister, given that Maine Democrats entire plan is to empower non-citizens to vote by subverting the entire process.
At no point in history has the Republican Party been a pro-slavery organization. What you’re talking about pre-dates its founding.
Democrats were literally founded as a pro-slavery political party and went to war to preserve it.
It may seem unusual but these days it’s typical. I worked in schools where half the students were special ed. Special ed is a wide net these days and it’s a way for schools to get away with not addressing academic and behavioral issues. People have no idea how much those kids can get away with.
I don’t know, it’s in the name so it must be in the party.
Not exactly. Van Buren, the founder of the party, opposed slavery but didn’t believe it was a federal matter but rather a state one. It was his opposition to expanding slavery that led to those Democrats who also opposed slavery to leave the party. It would be more correct to say the Democrats were founded as a party that supported the slave states’ right to continue the practice. The party, after the defection of those who opposed slavery, could be called a pro slavery party with no argument from me. However, calling it a Democrat belief seems like a way to absolve the South of something it was willing to fight to preserve. So if a southerner says the Dems were pro slavery and fought a war to preserve it, I would say no, your ancestors fought to keep slavery,
The President covered his back in the first press conference. He said that carrying water for DEI non-hackers put extra stress on capable employees, and that could result in even good people making mistakes.
For a guy who is constantly picking at nits, your citation of said principle (seems to be something you apparently believe in) is laughable. Ref: DEI thread just now.
Immigration is an issue in this country. It isn’t just about illegal immigration, although that’s the worst part of it. It’s the lack of dedicated assimilation policies meant to Americanize the people that come here legally. If this was done, most of these Somalis would no longer be Muslim, because Islam is in direct opposition to both the Christian and secular elements that are playing tug of war in the United States’ culture today.
However, I disagree with this point:
Democrats were literally founded as a pro-slavery political party and went to war to preserve it.
The Democratic Party is actually the Democratic-Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson in opposition to the Federalists in the days of Washington. It eventually dropped the “Republican” part of its name for convenience’s sake. After the Hartford Convention scandal destroyed the Federalist Party, the Democratic-Republicans became the sole party in the United States for a brief period of time. Eventually the Whigs rose up to replace the Federalists.
The Republican Party, however, was founded as an abolitionist party in the 1840s. It eventually became popular enough in the North to bring a candidate to the presidency. That was Lincoln. He won the election in 1860 despite not being on a single southern ballot, which made South Carolina secede from the Union. After the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1860, various southern states joined South Carolina and founded the Confederacy.
I don’t disagree in principle; I just like talking about this subject.
