AUGUSTA — The Legislature’s budget-writing committee on Tuesday heard from scores of people opposed to Gov. Paul LePage’s proposal to eliminate welfare programs that help asylum-seeking immigrants.

Speaking in French, Vincent Mwamba, 70, told the Appropriations Committee that he was a judge in his home country of the Congo, but when he refused to find an innocent man guilty his government came after him.

His wife and daughters were raped and his son was beaten by government thugs before he could send them to safety. He and his wife came to the U.S. seeking asylum.

“When we first came here my wife and I were put in separate shelters,” Mwamba said through an interpreter. “I spent the night on the floor sleeping with all the other men, lined up like people in a morgue.”

Mwamba said he lived day to day, waiting in a nearby vacant lot for the shelter to reopen at 6 p.m. “It is better to die than to live like that,” Mwamba said.

He said some of Maine’s social welfare programs, including a state-funded supplemental security income program for which he is eligible, allowed him a chance at a new life as he waits for the federal government to decide his asylum status.

Mwamba said if the program were ended, he and his wife would again be homeless.

“We won’t be able to buy food to eat. We won’t even be able to buy a bus ticket to leave,” he said. “We will have to go back to the shelter.”

LePage’s two-year budget proposal would make immigrants who are seeking asylum in Maine ineligible for state programs and would align Maine with the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996.

State law requires the Maine Department of Health and Human Services to provide Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families benefits to asylum-seekers, even when they are not eligible for similar federal programs.

The proposal is one of the changes LePage would make to state law under his $6.57 billion, two-year spending plan that includes sweeping sales and income tax reforms.

Maine is one of only five states that provide food benefits to immigrants and one of only 19 states that provide TANF benefits, according to testimony offered by Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew. 

The cuts would save about $2.4 million in the state’s two-year budget.

“This action will put Maine on par with federal policy and allow the department to redirect valuable resources to Maine’s most vulnerable citizens,” Mayhew told the committee.

But advocates for immigrants in Maine said the programs are not a waste of funds but an investment in the state’s future. 

Rev. Ruben Ruganza said he too came to Maine seeking asylum as he fled violence in his home country of the Democratic Republic of Congo. After three years in a refugee camp in Burundi, he fled that country too after members of his tribe were targeted and killed. In 2007, he sought asylum in the U.S. and ended up in Maine, he said.

He said he was granted asylum in 2008, received a work permit and a green card, started to work and has since become a U.S. citizen, working in Maine and paying taxes to the state and federal governments.

Ruganza said that without help from Portland’s General Assistance program, he would not have made it.

“I knew that the assistance was just a bridge between the despair and the hope,” Ruganza told the committee, “between dependence and self-sufficiency.”

He said once he was granted asylum, he worked hard to find a job, to become a citizen and to find a way to apply his skills and education in his new home.

“I am able now to provide for my family, and even help others,” he said. “I feel happy that I don’t have to depend on assistance.”

Others spoke of Maine’s aging and shrinking population and the need for new workers and young, growing families. 

Richard Berman, a Cape Elizabeth real estate developer, said he benefited from publicly subsidized housing when he first move to Portland’s Munjoy Hill in the 1970s.

“Gov. LePage has said that we have more people dying in Maine than being born,” Berman said. “And he’s right. We are losing population; we are an aging population. We need growth, we need to build our workforce and right now, new Mainers are doing that for us.”

Berman said fostering immigrant communities and helping them grow and become independent will be key to growing Maine’s economy.

“I’m opposed (to the LePage cuts) from an economic development standpoint,” Berman said. He said helping immigrants was an “investment.”

“It’s going to pay dividends both in the short term and in the long term,” Berman said. “In the short term, this money that’s being given out in (General Assistance) vouchers, whatever, doesn’t just disappear and you never see it again. It is disbursed right back into our economy.”

Berman said the money was spent on food, clothing and rent. In the long term, young, growing immigrant families were the workforce of the future, he said.

Mayhew said the savings in LePage’s budget plan would be spent to eliminate DHHS waiting lists of vulnerable Maine families, including people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Rep. Linda Sanborn, D-Gorham, charged Mayhew and the LePage administration with pitting one vulnerable group against another.

Mayhew said that wasn’t the case. “We are making decisions about what we can fund and what we can’t fund,” Mayhew said. “We aren’t pitting; we are reprioritizing.”

The committee, which is meeting jointly with the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee, will continue to review DHHS budget proposals for the rest of the week.

It will be several more weeks before the committee takes any action on LePage’s proposed budget. The Legislature must enact a two-year budget before June 30 to avoid a state government shutdown.

sthistle@sunjournal.com