Posted by Ann Corcoran on May 8, 2016
And, one in four students is in an ELL class.
We haven’t mentioned Lewiston much recently (no Somali kids have burned down apartment buildings there in the last few years).
This is your usual fluffy story about coming to America and I’m just posting it to tell you about the school system challenges your town will face if it “welcomes” refugees this year.
Besides the expense to the school system, this family obviously entered the US illegally and are in Maine where the welfare is good for so-called ‘asylum seekers.’ They are hoping to persuade an immigration judge that they are legitimate refugees and they have been told to go to Maine to wait out the legal process.
BTW, the article tells us Dad had a job selling cellphones and computers throughout Europe, so why didn’t he simply take the kids on one of his trips to Europe and ask for asylum there? There must be much more to his ‘story.’
From the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal:
LEWISTON — Joao Rodrigues and his children moved to Maine this past winter from Africa.
His children are among the city’s 1,374 students in the English Language Learner program. One out of every four Lewiston students is in the ELL program; most are Somali children, but ELL students speak a total of 34 languages.
[….]
Speaking Portuguese and communicating through an interpreter, he shared how he and his children fled their native Angola, a country of unrest and violence. They escaped to the Democratic Republic of the Congo before making their way to the United States. [“making their way” is code for arriving through questionable means—ed]
They arrived in New York in January with nothing. A pastor there recommended he take his family to Maine, where there are African communities and where he could get help.
See our very large archive on the Somali capital of New England—Lewiston—here. And, click here, for much more on Maine the welfare magnet where the governor was trying to slow the giveaways to non-citizens, but not sure he ever succeeded.
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