Once and future Mainers

First of two parts

In 1989, I left the small central Maine town where I grew up, as an impatient, precocious college freshman with every intent of shaking the dust off my feet, exploring the cosmopolitan life of metro Boston, and becoming a globe-trotting diplomat. I did not plan then to come back to rural Maine. But eight years later I did just that, and have never regretted it.

During the 1980s and ’90s, tens of thousands in my generation, those who would now be in their mid-20s to mid-30s, most from central and northern Maine, also left the state – but they didn’t come back. Many of those who left did so to pursue higher education: Maine is one of the highest net “exporters” of higher-education students in America. What we have lost is not just the innate talents of the exiting youth, but the knowledge and skills that they left to acquire.

The brain drain ebbs away the vitality of our economy and our communities slowly but fatally. In a knowledge-based economy, the education, skills and adaptability of our workers is the single biggest competitive issue. Economic competition is for human talent, and as a state we lose talent as fast or faster than we are nurturing and attracting it.

With top Maine policy-makers investing serious effort to understand this issue, it is critical that we take a hardheaded view of what the real root problem is, and how it can effectively be tackled. I will attempt the first here, and the second in a future installment.

The real problem is not simply the loss of youth born in Maine. That loss is just one facet of the broader problem, which is the lack of any meaningful talent attraction, workforce recruitment and pro-immigration policies to lure both native and non-native folks to Maine.

The decline in Maine’s youth population in fact has three demographically obvious facets: we aren’t having enough babies; our youth are moving away and not coming back; and not enough other people are moving here to replace those who leave. The first may not be an issue we can do much about, though it is in fact connected to the third issue.

The second issue – Maine’s brain drain – is now getting attention, and deservedly so. However, describing the elephant by focusing on this one salient feature poses a great risk of misdiagnosis and dangerously narrowing our policies in response.

Maine youth may leave for many very good reasons that we should not discourage, and may not be able to affect much. There are hundreds of great colleges and universities in New England and thousands in the United States. Great personal choice, coupled with the desire of most young people to explore, experience something different, and stretch the bonds to parents, will inevitably cause many to leave no matter what we do.

After college, there are many sectors in which the opportunity to truly develop and advance in Maine would not match the competition: Would any of us counsel a fledgling stock trader to pick Maine over Wall Street, or an aspiring e-commerce entrepreneur to pick Maine over Silicon Valley? Maine has and must develop its own clusters of world-class economic activity, but it will never have it all.

The critical question is not, why do our young people leave Maine, but how can we lure them back later, and how can we attract more people to come to join them?

What we have is not an outmigration problem, but a lack of robust, replenishing, reinvigorating immigration – immigration of our own exported youth and other new Mainers from elsewhere in America and the world. Enticing a former Mainer back after five or 10 years away poses the same challenge as how to make Maine an attractive and viable destination for other willing immigrants who were not born here.

Recognizing the issue in this light alters our premises about solutions; shifts us from very narrowly focused projects targeted at the few thousand Maine youth presently enrolled in high school and college, to outreach instead to a much broader pool of potential immigrants; and connects concern about Maine’s youth population with the larger challenges of economic development and workforce development. A critical strategy for attracting youth to Maine may be to focus on developing the skills and talents of their parents, relatives and neighbors already in the Maine work force in order to create a more vibrant economy here.

Immigration has had a significant impact on the age and education levels of Maine’s population before. In the 1970s, a wave of new Mainers arrived, many of them (including my parents) idealistic proponents of rural self-sufficiency attracted by Maine’s cheap land and tight-knit communal identity. This immigration boom doubled Maine’s educational attainment level – the proportion of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher – over a decade.

Immigration has other very important spin-off benefits. For our economy to thrive, we must continue to increase our exports not just of goods but also of services outside the state and around the world. Immigration, from both domestic and foreign sources, means a large pool of people with contacts and comfort interacting with a large cross section of people and negotiating successfully in a regional, national and international context. Diversity of culture, color and nationality is a valuable and increasingly indispensable communal and economic asset.

Immigration also holds the promise of higher birth rates and population growth. Maine’s minuscule birth rate is reflective of our overwhelming ethnic homogeneity and lack of racial minorities and immigrant populations that, for a variety of reasons, have much higher birth rates than do whites.

Jim Tierney, former Maine attorney general, advised me when I was in law school that the key decisions in life really all boil down to: “Where do you want to live and whom do you want to live with?”

I want to live in a Maine that is vibrant, energetic, proud, neighborly, clean, tolerant, diverse and ambitious, I want the whole world to know that’s what we are about, and I want to live with anyone, from any place, who wants the same thing.

I think if we make Maine that kind of place, we’ll have no problem convincing our youth to come back – and probably siphon off a good share of everyone else’s youth, too!

Yellow Light Breen is an attorney who lives in Holden. A graduate of public schools in St. Albans and Newport, and Harvard Law School, he returned to Maine in 1997 to work for then- Gov. Angus King. He currently is an executive at Bangor Savings Bank. The views expressed are wholly his own.