Bill Laitner

Detroit Free Press

Just over a week after he was re-elected to a seventh term as Oakland County executive, L. Brooks Patterson is getting pushback over what critics say is the latest evidence of his intolerance for Middle Eastern refugees.

The Oakland County Business Roundtable, which Patterson founded in 1993, plans as its keynote speaker at the group’s big breakfast next month an author known for his virulent anti-refugee stance. James Simpson is author of a 2015 book, “The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.”

This week, Fifth Third Bank said it had withdrawn its key sponsorship of the breakfast, which annually draws as many as 300 business people by invitation only.

►Related: Brooks Patterson wins 7th term as Oakland County executive

But Patterson’s spokesman Bill Mullan — in a statement that he said was from county government, not from Patterson personally — said Simpson was invited to speak “precisely because he is provocative” and that the purpose of having him “is about stimulating meaningful conversation on a timely and important topic in our country.”

Mullan also said that Simpson was paying his own way to the breakfast at the Auburn Hills Marriott in Pontiac and not being paid to speak, although presumably he would be allowed to sign and sell copies of his book.

Simpson, reached Thursday night near his home in Baltimore, said he would express a viewpoint at the breakfast that opposes President Barack Obama’s policy of resettling refugees.

"I plan to say what I've been saying all over the country — that the refugee resettlement program is an expensive program and getting more expensive every year, that's its a very secretive program and that we're creating enclaves of people who seem to have very little interest in assimilating" in American culture, he said.

"My book shows this. These enclaves provide fertile ground for breeding homegrown terrorists, the very people we've found in more than 500 plots that the FBI has exposed since 9/11," Simpson said.

Fifth Third Bank has been the main sponsor of the event for more than six years, said Vice President Jack Riley, the bank's spokesman.

“We think the round table does valuable work for Oakland County,” Riley said Thursday. The breakfast is the occasion for the round table’s committee heads to make their reports and recommendations to Patterson and to Matt Gibb, the county’s deputy executive, as well as to the group as a whole, Riley said. Fifth Third Bank had expected to pay most of the event’s expenses, Riley said, although he declined to specify how much.

“But we did withdraw our sponsorship for this year’s breakfast when we learned (on Wednesday) that the speaker was James Simpson,” he said. Simpson’s background was exposed in an online blog, “and then we did our own research,” Riley said.

The round table has never before “been a platform for political views” but instead had local speakers from local businesses, he added.

The invitation to have Simpson speak “is just the latest in L. Brooks Patterson’s discriminatory and misinformed quest against the resettlement of refugees in Oakland County,” said Rana Elmir, deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan.

This week, opponents of Simpson’s talk created an online petition at change.org where “Oakland County residents and business owners can show their support for Syrian refugees.” By Thursday night, the petition had 269 signers.

Patterson spoke out against resettling Syrian refugees in Pontiac last year, then in September said he would sue the federal government to block plans to bring refugees into the county.

“He seems to relish in sowing division and betraying the American ideal of equality,” Elmir said of Patterson. “Now he has moved to pushing hate propaganda in the business community. The business community should follow Fifth Third Bank's lead in rejecting these attempts as well,” Elmir said. She called Simpson “a man who peddles propaganda and bigotry.”

Although refugee resettlement is a federal matter over which state and county governments have little or no say, local government officials have increasingly weighed in on the issue over the last two years, as election campaigning ratcheted up discussions about it.

Last month, in a unanimous vote, the Waterford Township board of trustees passed a resolution outlining concerns about security in the nation and the community if refugees and other immigrants are not carefully checked out for possible ties to terrorism.

"We're not saying Syrians are never going to be welcome in Waterford (but) the bottom line is, we've got to protect what's ours," township Supervisor Gary Wall told an audience of several hundred people, before Wall and other elected officials voted.

State Rep. Jim Runestad, R-White Lake, said the issue is more complex than most Americans realize, affecting not only the national security but also local government budgets.

"People can say it's about ethnicity or bigotry, and it shouldn't be," Runestad said, in an interview just after the Waterford board's vote.

"One thing people don't hear about is the significant cost that the refugee influx puts on local schools. The federal government isn't paying for any of that," he said.

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com