PORTLAND — Maine’s future will require more people and a state open to all the world’s immigrants. With posturing that ranges from opposition to benign neglect, many established Maine leaders have failed to lead, respond, or even address that imperative.

The citizenship process is dysfunctional because federal immigration is a crisis requiring comprehensive reform.

Choosing citizenship over local democracy, The Press Herald editorialized against Portland’s Question 4, the November ballot measure that would have given legal immigrants local voting rights.

No Press Herald editorial came after Portland voters shockingly almost approved the measure.

The newspaper took a pass on DREAM Act federal legislation that gives legal status to an estimated 2 million functional and cultural Americans born of undocumented parents. Under that bill, legal eligibility would come if, having arrived at 16 years of age and in this country for over five years, they had no criminal record, graduated from high school and completed two years of college or military service.

Campaigning for Question 4, in conversations with about 1,000 Portlanders, my sense is that the Democratic Party’s conventional wisdom was key to the measure’s defeat. Prominent local Democrats did not make the initiative a priority, for good reason.

Democracy’s voter integration of their patriotic attachment to family and community aside, supporting legal immigrants of color in an anti-immigrant climate is not mainstream politics. Many prominent Democrats, including Portland’s mayor and many of his recent predecessors, either had no position on Question 4, were indifferent, dismissive or opposed.

Democrats affiliated with the civil rights movement also kept their distance. It was left to the Maine League of Young Voter volunteers, who qualified Question 4 for the ballot. Many moved on to other issues; some accepted “insider” predictions of a landslide loss on Election Day. A second look is now in order. With more active involvement from Portland Democrats, through leadership and financial support, prospects are good for immigrant voter initiative passage in 2011 or 2012.

Maine’s two Democratic representatives in Congress, Mike Michaud and Chellie Pingree, both supported the DREAM Act. For them, it is money for Maine’s future and a civil rights issue.

How can Congress turn away a major public investment in a young man like Eric Balderas, in America since he was 2, who speaks the Queen’s English, and is a Harvard University molecular biology student?

Why oppose a DREAM Act that is an economic boon? The Congressional Budget Office has concluded it would slash the federal deficit by $1.4 billion in 10 years and a UCLA Study states DREAM Act beneficiaries add close to $4 trillion to our economy over the course of their lives. There is also the moral outrage: A new apartheid impacting American-born children of undocumented parents and undocumented Americanized young people.

Although it passed in the House, the DREAM Act failed in the U.S. Senate. Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins did not support it or personally meet with proponents. No massive Arizona immigration is moving them to engage actively. But it is central to Maine’s future.

The country will look far more like California than Maine. Collins and Snowe voted with a Republican-manufactured anti-immigrant mindset for the whitest and most elderly state in the union. They should heed the words of Maine Development Foundation director Ed Cervone, who urges Maine to fully utilize immigrant potential.

College-bound Selvin Arevalo, a 25-year-old undocumented immigrant Portlander, fits the demographic profile Maine needs or it will, according to Cervone, “decline to zero growth in the next 20 years.”

Because of the DREAM Act’s failed passage, Arevalo, along with Balderas, is on the path to deportation – not integration.

In control of Maine’s Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, key Republicans are talking about Arizona-like legislation requiring public officials to report anyone “reasonably suspected” as undocumented.

Some want to deport American-born children because their parents are undocumented. Will Gov.-elect LePage, Collins and Snowe follow that path?

“Actively seeking and integrating immigrant populations into our state,” a MDF July report emphasized, “is a strategy that offers real opportunity for enhancing economic vitality in Maine.”

LePage, Snowe, Collins and those congressional and state legislators are all good people. In the new year, we can only hope that they take to heart this reality – for the sake of Maine’s future.

– Special to the Press Herald