When 1,100 Somali refugees relocated to Lewiston, Maine a couple of years ago, some of the town's residents started a grassroots protest movement, turning the sleepy, 40,000-strong mill town into a battleground for outside agitators on both sides of the immigration issue. The case intensified when the town's mayor wrote an open letter to the Somalis, essentially demanding they stop telling friends and relatives to move to Maine. The letter fed rumors that had already been spreading, that the Somalis were all welfare cases, draining the resources of social services and law enforcement. So on January 11, 2004—a date chosen in part to remind people of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks—white supremacists from around the country gathered for a march on Lewiston, while churches and human rights organizations both in and out of town staged a counter-rally for unity.
Ziad H. Hamzeh's documentary The Letter: An American Town & The "Somali Invasion" captures the events of the day and the furor leading up to them, in a rapidly edited, emotionally draining blitz of soundbites and street fights. At least superficially, The Letter confronts the problems that arise when a nation of third- and fourth-generation immigrants are faced with a fresh set of huddled masses. Though intimidation and anger rarely stem the tide—and though Lewiston owes much of its existence to the thousands of French-Canadians who arrived in the 1870s—the town's residents still look straight into Hamzeh's camera and talk about how culture needs to be isolated and preserved from generation to generation, like strains of yeast.
But unlike the recent documentary Farmingville, which details how an otherwise decent group of people let anti-immigration advocates cloud their judgment regarding an influx of day laborers, The Letter stays fairly even-handed, and misses some ironies. It's clear how Hamzeh feels about the racist groups who insist that "all men are created equal, if you're white and Christian," but he lets them speak their piece unchallenged when he might've pushed back a little, correcting some misperceptions about, for example, the Somali unemployment rate. Instead of trotting out statistics, the director answers misstatements with anecdotes from the other side. Hamzeh also could've had a go at the immigration defenders, who judge the motives of their enemies as "hate," when for some it may just be a resistance to being condescended to by the pro-diversity crowd. The Letter makes effective drama, but ultimately it's just an outrage machine, designed to get the viewer fired up by the sight of warring ideologues preaching to their own.