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PPH plays it fast and loose with facts on immigrant EMTs

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The Portland Press Herald, in its unquenchable thirst to fawn over illegal immigrant issues of all stripes, rushed today to pay homage to a community college program that is training immigrants as EMTs without the newspaper noting or even recognizing the many possible negative consequences.

It's the kind of blind rush to judgment we have come to expect from the PPH and its purveyors of blind progressivism.

This program, in its embryonic stages at Southern Maine Community College, could easily put Mainers at risk. Imagine if you were suffering a heart attack or had just been in a car accident ... would you want someone tending to your health needs who speaks broken English?

Who could easily misinterpret what you are trying to tell them during an emergency about your health needs, allergies or medications that you take?

Yet there is no mention to make sure they have a sturdy grasp of the English language before they are deployed to rescue us.

When a patient is in distress the last thing they want to have to worry about is whether their emergency responders can speak English.

And look at how the newspaper parses its words between headline and copy. This looks like journalism you should beware of, not trust.

In the headline it refers to new Mainers with medical backgrounds.

So I guess they must be talking about people from other lands who are citizens of the United States, who have read and studied our Constitution, who can recite every president, who know the principles upon which this country was founded like every immigrant has to do to become a citizen and were doctors or nurses. How reassuring, right?

But in the copy, or editorial, itself, it talks about helping new immigrants who have a background in health care. That's a lot different than a "medical" background, PPH editorial board.

Someone with a health-care background could've been a billing clerk at a Somalia clinic, or cleaned a health care facility in Syria, just for an example.

And if they're immigrants they are not necessarily "legal" immigrants, are they? It's important to know there's a difference.

I'm sure the editorial board assigning storm photos and stories today up in Portland are hootin' and hollerin' about the "racist" down in Lebanon, but I guarantee you they don't want someone talking broken English asking them where it hurts as they prepare to treat them during an emergency.

Well, if you guys - and gals - on the editorial board would care more about protecting the health care of real Mainers rather than your mantle of dilettante journalistic progressivism, well, maybe then you'd be a news organization the folks of Maine could really trust.

And here's a novel thought for tomorrow's editorial. Why not prod college administrators to reach out to the general population at SMCC to help open up this program to them, too. Help with their EMT course, earn their certification and get a $22 an hour job with an ambulance company.

Or didn't you think of that?

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