The unwelcome bill

Nothing better illustrates the reason the Legislature has overwhelmed itself with nearly 3,000 bills than Rep. Tom Shields’ “English First” proposal, which sounds fine until anyone gives it a scintilla of thought. Then it sounds terrible: a divisive, ill-informed, misdirected idea that makes Maine, a state built in part by non-English speakers and in desperate need of increased population, more isolated than ever.

Moreover, the bill has no particular use to the public — even Rep. Shields says “it doesn’t change anything in their daily lives” — except to attack the very core of Maine culture by denigrating the second language of Maine and the people who speak it, whose ancestors, by the way, were here long before Maine became a state. The Legislature’s revulsion to this bill has been the most encouraging event in Augusta this session.

Rep. Shields pleads that he has been misunderstood, that his bill was not meant to offend French-speakers. Instead, it was meant to offend Spanish speakers, who, he says, are “creeping up this way.” Mighty stealthy, those Spanish-speakers. A bunch of them have been masquerading for years as seasonal farm workers, the inexpensive blueberry rakers and apple pickers Maine depends on. Turns out they weren’t doing backbreaking work because they wanted to make a buck but because they wanted to force governmental proclamations to appear in more than one language.

The number of exemptions found in Rep. Shields’ bill, LD 264, suggest that he tried to eliminate the circumstances in which his bill would do the most harm — in legal proceedings, questions of health and safety, highway directions, etc. From the evidence of the bill, he’s no racist; he’s just been given bad information. Or he didn’t consider the information that surrounds him in his Auburn district: The city was built in the mid- to late-19th century on the shoe factories that attracted countless French Canadians to the region. Many didn’t speak English and many faced prejudice precisely because of legislation like LD 264. The bill dishonors the memory of the people who shaped his community.

And being open to outsiders is particulalry important now. Maine’s birthrate is at its lowest level in a century. Northern counties are losing population decade by decade. Either Maine attracts people from away (including those from far away) or it dies.

Certainly the people who move here from other countries should learn to speak English even as they add their own cultural backgrounds to the melting pot. But why make them feel unwelcome while they’re learning?