I would like to talk about a bit of fairly recent American History. I promise it is not boring.

During the late 1930s, a ship with more than 900 Jews was turned away from several ports, including the United States, when they were fleeing Nazi Germany and their likely demise.

The ship was named the MS St. Louis and it will always be a blemish on U.S. history (just as slavery is) that this country turned that ship away. Its passengers went back to Germany where many of them perished in the Holocaust.

To their credit, our schools teach their students about this failure to show compassion and save some lives. Officials here knew that those Jews would perish without being taken in. It wasn’t done by accident.

Flash forward 40 some-odd years and the Soviet Union, which was persecuting the Jews, decided it would allow all of their Jewish people to immigrate to other countries that would have them. America, perhaps remembering the shame of the ship MS St. Louis, rose to the call and took as many as would come here. Thousands did.

Many of these former Soviet Jews came to Maine. In Lewiston-Auburn Maine, because this was a working-class community, we got peasant families with little formal education or training.

It took time to get their green cards and, during that time, the state supported those asylum seekers. When they got their cards to work, the Jewish community of Lewiston-Auburn decided that the best they could do with no English speaking skills or training was to become house painters.

I know this because I was a part of that community and I remember that many Jewish members of the community had their houses painted once the Soviet Jews got their working papers. Then, those new-to-America refugees became something else: experienced house painters, and they supported their families and their children went on to live the American dream.

I tell those two stories to ask people to look way back into the past the next time that they look into the mirror. Except for the Native Americans, whose country this was originally, and the slaves, who came here without choice or freedom, all Americans have come from somewhere else and many came from ancestors who were running here to save their very lives.

They didn’t enter this country in state rooms but in the dilapidated boats. Putting it gently, they were fleeing countries that had dis-invited them to stay.

It is no different today, except that they are not Europeans, but people of color.

One last story: although I am Jewish, I come from a Franco-American heritage, and I know the true stories my grandparents shared about the signs in the windows of almost all businesses, except for the mills, that stated “No French need apply.”

Still, we came, and worked in factories, and educated our children to embrace the American dream. The one thing we did have was green cards, because American manufacturers needed workers immediately.

Catholic Charities in Portland is one of only nine designated refugee sites in this country. Many of the people who arrive here do so without the proper documentation of their refugee status.

They often had to flee their country of origin (most are from African nations) without the documentation that one would expect of a refugee. It can take months to years to sort out who they are and why this country, the United States, has already decided to take them in.

It is inhumane for us to decide, before the federal government has, that an asylum seeker is really an illegal immigrant. That is the truth about asylum seekers.

What I am trying to say here is that today’s asylum seekers are no different from our grandparents, or their ancestors, and without General Assistance, they will have no housing. Whole families will be turned out into the streets.

Here is the real irony: most of today’s asylum seekers are just what Maine desperately needs — educated people, most of whom are young, English-speaking, professionals. We are being fools, turning away people we need, when we turn them away from the very General Assistance our ancestors had until they got their green cards.

So, with regard to General Assistance for vitally needed housing, it comes down to which side of history Maine people want to be on. Do we repeat the story of the ship the United States turned back to Nazi Germany, or the story of the Soviets we took in?

Legislators should support Sen. Amy Volk’s amendment to LD 369 that would give asylum seekers up to two years to get their papers for permission to work.

Susan Lamb is executive director of the Maine Chapter National Association of Social Workers.

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