One Year and $4 Million – Brings Us Full Circle

Alanna

It’s been a year since the County first adopted the ‘Immigration Resolution’ and because of continual participation from more moderate voices, it is now, but a shadow of its original proposed self. The Resolution is, at its core, faulted because of its assertion that illegal immigration has been determined to cause ‘lawlessness and economic hardship’. This declaration has never been substantiated and continues to remain an unfounded claim upon which this resolution was founded.

If you recall, the original version suggested checking immigration status at all public facilities even schools and parks. Thankfully, staff recognized that implementation of such a far reaching and radical policy was unwise. And, with the guidance and suggestion of more reasonable perspectives, began the process of affecting changes to mitigate not only the potential of costly lawsuits but to reign in the more radical elements that initially suggested the plan.

By October, we were left with a short list of 8 identified services that could be ‘reasonably’ restricted combined with a policy that mandated officers to inquire into immigration status with anyone they came into contact with that they believed had ‘probable cause’ to be undocumented. Shortly thereafter, it was determined that 2 of the previously identified services should also not be restricted and the list shrank to 6.

In April, with the start of the planning for the ‘09 Fiscal Plan’ another opportunity presented itself for another scale back when cameras became too costly of an investment. We then lobbied and succeeded in having the Resolution modified so that Officer’s could fallback to the previous policy of ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ combined with a mandated post-arrest procedure for status checks, Now, the “Immigration Resolution” consists of the restrictions to the 6 services, mandated status checks after arrest and the general resolution. All of this, has born a price tag of $4 million dollars, and for all practical purposes has brought us full circle, back to the place, in essence where we started.

“A Hispanic Population in Decline”

Elena

The family that planted corn in the front yard of their $500,000 home is gone from Carrie Oliver’s street. So are the neighbors who drilled holes into the trees to string up a hammock.

Oliver’s list goes on: The loud music. The beer bottles. The littered diapers. All gone. When she and her husband, Ron, went for walks in their Manassas area neighborhood, she would take a trash bag and he would carry a handgun. No more. “So much has changed,” she said in a gush of relief, standing with her husband on a warm summer evening recently outside a Costco store.

A short distance away, across the river of retail commerce that is Sudley Road, Norman Gonzalez spoke of change not as renewal, but as a kind of collapse.

Business at his restaurant, Cuna del Sol, has declined 50 percent. Worse still, his extended family’s slow, steady relocation from the Guatemalan town of Jutiapa to the bustling Prince William suburbs has imploded. “A year ago, I had the biggest family in all of Manassas, maybe 100 relatives,” he said.

Now, Gonzalez, a legal U.S. resident, has his own list: Langley Park, Chantilly, Fairfax City. That is where his brothers have scattered, and they will not visit him. “There’s too much fear here,” Gonzalez said.

Since the day one year ago when Prince William County supervisors launched their crackdown on illegal immigration, the gulf between the Olivers’ relief and Gonzalez’s dejection has narrowed little, and possibly widened.

At least there is one thing partisans on both sides agree on: Hispanic immigrants are leaving Prince William. Whether their departure has improved the county’s quality of life, or pushed its already strained economy further downward, is the new topic of contention driven largely by views of whether the presence of immigrants was a good thing in the first place.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/09/AR2008070902173.html