Surprisingly, with an estimated 8,000 immigrants moving to Maine in the last decade, there have been no reports of family pets being eaten by them. Yet according to rumors and baseless accounts circulating in social media and former President Trump’s assertion that he saw someone claiming it on television, one might think that it is only a matter of time before it happens here. After all, “millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump declared in last week’s presidential debate.

Trump’s use of the southern border crisis – one largely due to people fleeing poverty and violence – to frighten Americans is morally reprehensible and engenders real fear among immigrants in Maine and across our nation. I wonder if Maine lobster boat captains who hire immigrants to pull traps or managers of lobster processing plants share Trump’s brutal opinion of immigrants. Do blueberry farm owners in Washington County or potato growers in Aroostook County who depend on immigrants to help harvest their crops share their views of immigrants? Would the state’s restaurants and hotels echo Trump’s vicious claims about immigrants?

At Flood Brothers farm in Clinton, 50 immigrants make up half of the hired workers. They milk the cows and tend crops. “We cannot do it without them,” farm operation partner Jenni Tilton-Flood told WMTW Channel 8 in April this year. In Saco, immigrant workers make up three-quarters of Luke’s Lobster processing plant’s 100 employees. “If we didn’t have a workforce coming from other countries, we wouldn’t have a huge portion of our lobster industry here in Maine,” plant co-founder Ben Conniff told News Center Maine in April.

With the oldest population in any state – a median age of 45.1 years – Maine will increasingly depend on immigrants to fill positions left by those who retire. According to a 2019 Maine Department of Economic and Community Development report, the state will need to add 75,000 people to the workforce in the present decade. The report projected aging of the Maine workforce will mean a loss of 65,000 workers through 2030. Earlier this year, recognizing that immigrants must help fill the need for more workers, Gov. Janet Mills established the Office of New Americans to help new immigrants integrate into the state’s workforce.

Contrary to candidate Trump’s distorted representation of immigrants, in this state, and elsewhere in the nation, new immigrants contribute to the economic and cultural vitality of life. Research from the American Immigration Council makes this very clear. The 57,500 immigrants who resided in Maine in 2022 had a combined household income of $2.3 billion, spent $1.7 billion in goods and services, paid $118.2 million in rent, and contributed $625.1 million in taxes, including $215.5 million in local and state taxes.

WGME 13 reported in January of this year that there are approximately 2,500 immigrant-owned businesses in Maine. It attributed the revival of Lisbon Street, the commercial heart of Lewiston, to immigrant entrepreneurs. In Portland, according to the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center, immigrant-owned businesses in 2021 employed 14,659 people.

Despite the undeniable positive contributions of new immigrants to our state and the nation, former President Trump is using attacks on foreign-born people to instill fear among Maine’s citizens and others across this country. His comment at the debate about immigrants eating dogs and cats shows how vile and disgusting his vision of our country is. Can you imagine the chaos and broken families, the gross injury and worse that would ensue if a Trump-led government attempted to round up people for mass deportation, as he has promised to do?

With nearly 60,000 new immigrants living and sharing in the lives of Maine’s communities, there is a very high likelihood that someone you know or see in your daily life would be subjected to racial profiling, random questioning, summary arrest and worse. Undoubtedly, families would be torn apart and relatives and friends would be detained or deported. Only would-be dictators entertain such heinous ideas and hold such hatred toward fellow human beings.