Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
Mayor asked to step down after bigoted remarks
Posted by Christopher Coen on October 2, 2012
Two groups are asking Lewiston Mayor Robert Macdonald to resign following bigoted comments he made about the city’s refugee population. The mayor told the BBC that “cost the city a lot of money”, and “if you want to come in here…that’s fine…but…when you come here you accept OUR culture, and you leave your culture at the door.” An article at the Portland Press Herald explains:
LEWISTON — Two groups are asking Lewiston Mayor Robert Macdonald to resign following comments he made about the city’s Somali population.
The Lewiston office of the Maine People’s Alliance is gathering signatures for a petition asking Macdonald to step down.
The Sun Journal reports that the African Diaspora Institute in Portland also called for Macdonald’s resignation during a Monday news conference outside City Hall… Read more here
cory82 said
New immigrants do not Americanize. They try to acculturate and they don’t do it in one generation.
derrick333 said
Does the mayor factor in the money the immigrants bring in to the tax base paying for things like food and shelter? What about the labor they add to the local economy? Even if some of them are on welfare, that too brings in money to the local economy since its paid for at the state and federal levels. The only place I can imagine it costing them more money is the at the school district level, to pay for ESL, but that is educating the workforce of the future for the local economy. The mayor doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Dini said
American has always been influenced by cultures of arriving immigrants. Think of St Patrick’s Day, pizza, the heavy African-American influence on our music, etc. Blue jeans were popularized as work clothes in the 1850s by Levi Strauss, a German immigrant in San Francisco.
cory82 said
The crypto-fascist right-wing in this country believes that anything not from a northern European culture must be inferior by nature.