As Maine Goes, so Goes the Nation: How Catholic Charities are Aiding Demographic Change
In 2019, Portland, Maine was overrun with hundreds of migrants from Central Africa. All of them had traveled along the “underground railroad” of migrant safe houses that extends from Central America through Mexico, and into the United States. Once they arrived in America, Catholic Charities Maine assisted in sending hundreds of the Angolans and Congolese migrants from San Antonio to Portland, paying for their bus fare and providing specific instructions on what to do and where to go to claim benefits. Two local Mainers, David Pippin and Ashley Livingston, together with their children age five and three, were kicked out of a homeless shelter to make room for migrants and forced to pitch a tent to keep a roof over their heads.
According to a State Department report, from 2005 to 2014 the United States spent $96.6 billion on refugees, and $126 billion including the cost of the refugees’ spouses and children. The bill however only accounts for the programs managed by the US Department of Health of Human Services, or HHS. As Neil Munro writes, “It excludes additional taxpayer spending via state programs, as well as federal spending on Social Security, education, and housing programs, plus tax credits.” It also excluded the money spent by the vast and interconnected network of organizations, NGOs, MFIs (microfinance institutions), and religious bodies like Catholic Charities Maine (CCM).
CCM is one of many religious organizations that, as the Heritage Foundation observes, works with the government and NGOs to help move refugees into Maine. CCM also provided legal services to the migrants, including arranging immigration attorneys to help with asylum claims and deportation defense. Another organization is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the national anti-poverty and social justice program of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. USCCB was founded in Chicago in 1969 with the help of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, for the purpose of funding his Industrial Areas Foundation. (Interestingly, it was this foundation that trained a young Barack Obama in “community organizing.”)
Alinsky’s writings shed light on the political strategies that are guiding the Left’s march through the institutions. As David Horowitz writes in Shadow Party, “Alinsky observed that radicals could achieve revolutionary change without majority support if they understood and exploited the rules of the game.” One way to do this is by infiltrating institutions with deep roots in communities — churches, unions, ethnic organizations and so on. These groups then work with federal agencies to circumvent the law whenever it is not in their favor.
This is what’s happening throughout the US right now, especially in Maine. In 2016, Maine’s former Governor Paul Lepage announced that he would be withdrawing the state from a refugee resettlement program. Nevertheless, refugees kept arriving. How? Once again, through Catholic Charities Maine, which helped resettle at least 600 migrants following Lepage’s announcement. CCM reported a revenue of $27.7 million from 2016-2017 — with a majority of its money ($14.2 million) coming from government payments, and $6.9 million from Medicaid. Altogether, “The Church and related Catholic charities and schools have collected more than $1.6 billion since 2012 in US contracts and grants.”
Another member of the shadow party that is changing the demographics of Maine from the inside out is current Governor Janet Mills. In June of 2018, Donald Giusti, a white man, was murdered in a racially-motivated attack by a gang of Somalis at Kennedy Park in Lewiston. (The Mayor of Lewiston, Shane Bouchard, says that these types of incidents are common at Kennedy Park. A local mom, for example, recorded a video of a mob of Somali teens and kids with bats and other weapons attacking two non-Somalis.) Yet when Mills, then-Attorney General, led a rally in Kennedy Park in 2019 called “Standing Up Against Hate,” she condemned Islamophobia and not the racism of the Somalis who killed Giusti. During her time as AG, Mills repeatedly declined to persecute and slow-walked investigations of migrants in Lewiston accused of violent crimes.
In 1980 there were 640 Somalis in the whole of the United States. Now there are at minimum 6,000 in Maine alone, 3,500 of which in Lewiston. Ann Corcoran, editor of the Refugee Resettlement Watch, explains the process by which refugees are resettled in America: “The US State Department brings in the refugees that the UN has largely chosen for us, and Homeland Security are supposed to screen them. Then, [refugees] are divided up between nine major contractors (VOLAGS) that include groups such as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, World Lutheran Service, and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. There are six of them that are supposedly religious charities […] funded by US taxpayers.” These contractors divide up their allotment of refugees among 350 subcontractors in 190 American cities.
Refugee settlement in the US is big business, especially for religious charities. The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service for instance, which provides foster care and other services to migrant children, received $28,407,684 from the HHS in 2018. As Michelle Malkin observed, “This sprawling network of aid stations has been in place for years, bolstered by global interests, left-wing activists, and religious institutions that advocate for illegal aliens.” Why do these charities want to smuggle in illegal alien children in particular? Simple answer: each child is worth about $50,000 in grant money. As Twitter account The Last Refuge puts it, “Faith Based Immigration Services is a code-speak for legalized human smuggling.”
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Many conservatives within the post-liberal Right still believe that the Catholic Church and other religious groups are capable of resisting the liberal establishment. In reality, most religious organizations are institutionally captured and working to further a liberal agenda. Even Catholic Integralists in the US, supposedly members of the ‘New Right’, are aligning themselves with the Left on key issues.
Adrian Vermuele, for example, supports hate speech laws, vaccine mandates, and, of course, mass immigration. In one blog post for The Mirror of Justice, the Harvard Law Professor advocates for an immigration system that would “disproportionately favor immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America” (like the ones coming to Portland, Maine) and argues that “We must overcome the know-nothing bigotry of the past.” He goes on to write: “We have come a long way, but we still have far to go — towards the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.” Former New York Post Sohrab Ahmari has also lamented the “global resurgence of particularism at the expense of the more universalist aspirations that used to animate the modern West.” But wasn’t Angela Merkel, together with the numerous NGOs, religious charities, and Christian democrats during the 2015 European migrant crisis, guided by “universalist aspirations”?
If the integralist Right and the Catholic Charities were able to realize their vision of a world free of ‘bigotry’ and strong borders, it would be at the expense of American natives, whose country is being reconstructed to favor migrants. Christians are obligated to care for the homeless, the downtrodden, and the sick (Luke 12:33-34) – but this does not mean prioritizing foreigners over our own people. As philosopher René Girard writes in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, “We are living through a caricatural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.”
What happened in Portland in 2019, where Congolese and Angolan migrants overwhelmed the city’s housing capacity and drained its funds, should serve as a lesson for the Right. The post-liberal Right will never align on all the issues, and engaging in purity spirals is never fruitful. But if there’s an issue that we all must categorically reject, it is mass immigration – both legal and illegal. The dispossession of the West cannot be blamed on, nor justified with Christianity. There’s nothing charitable, or ‘Christ-like’, about smuggling in illegal aliens for the sake of profit and power.
Forrest Robinson is a writer. He writes on forrestrobinson.substack.com.
