The Migrant Crisis — in Portland, Maine

The Portland migrant crisis was revealed in the FY 2023 budget request for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a DHS component. In requesting an additional $24 million (on top of $150 million allocated for FY 2022) for migrants through FEMA's Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP), DHS explained:

The Lure of the Pine Tree State

• A July 15 article in the Christian Science Monitor offers some clues. It's a rather lengthy human-interest story that details the threats and dangers foreign nationals face while traversing from far and wide to the Southwest border.
• The passage, including the modifier "as far reaching", suggests that DHS is a little surprised, too.

Alienation

• It has been a constant in American history for aliens to go to communities where their friends, family, and countrymen have already resettled

Portland Struggles with the Migrant Surge

• The city's compassion finally hit a wall in May, when it was providing shelter for 1,771 people - 1,200-plus "asylum seekers" and 500 homeless locals in a series of shelters and hotel rooms spread over a three-county area.
• Portland is reimbursed for 70 percent of those housing costs by the state, while the other 30 percent comes from FEMA.

As of the date of this email, there is no further shelter OR hotel capacity in Portland, Maine.

• In May 2019, there were 65 individuals in Portland's family shelter, an additional 300-plus families (1,091 individuals) in hotels, and 43 in South Portland's Eastpoint Christian Church
• There is a local labor shortage, which the newly arrived migrants will help alleviate.

The surge over the Southwest border shows no signs of abating.

• DHS estimates that when CDC orders directing the expulsion of illegal migrants issued pursuant to Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the pandemic are lifted, up to 18,000 illegal entrants per day will cross the border - 540,000 per month, or 6.57 million per year.

If just 5 percent are Portland bound, that's 328,000 new arrivals annually - to a city with a population of fewer than 69,000, in a state of just over 1.372 million

• The unemployment rate in Maine is low - 2.8 percent, compared to 3.5 percent nationally in July.

Part - not much compared to the president's $10,000 student-loan forgiveness with its $469 billion minimum price tag - of that increased government spending is on transportation, housing, and provision for those new migrants.

• Compared to the country as a whole, Portland is dealing with a relative handful of newly arrived migrants and struggling to do so.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Migrant-Crisis-Portland-Maine