A recent study on immigration from George Mason Univsity seems to have brought out the worst in our County Chair, Corey Stewart and newly appointed CXO, Melissa Peacor. Perhaps Ms. Peacor should be forgiven. She is a newly hired CXO who apparently came in under the auspices of Mr. Stewart. She hasn’t been around long enough to be an independent thinker. Even if she is, perhaps it is wiser to quote the party line. However, in the case of Corey Stewart, there is simply no pass. He is his usual bigoted, uninformed, blow-hard, name-calling, opportunistic self.
From the News and Messenger:
A new study from the George Mason University’s Project on Immigration finds many immigrants have lived in fear since the passage of Prince William’s 2007 resolution that requires police to check legal status of those who are arrested.
The study was conducted by Debra Lattanzi Shutika, an English professor and folklorist, and Carol Cleaveland, a professional social worker. Lattanzi Shutika also said they were both “ethnographers,” which she defined as a research methodology that focuses on in-depth interviews with people.
“We go into communities for long periods of time and talk in depth to people,” Lattanzi Shutika said, adding that the GMU study conducted interviews in two communities in Manassas called the Weems Neighborhood and Sumner Lakes. “In some cases, we had two-to-three hour interviews.”
For the study, headlined on a press release from GMU as “Strict Immigration Law in Virginia County Adversely Affecting Well-Being of Latino Residents, New Survey Shows,” the two researchers interviewed residents of 60 Spanish-speaking households and 104 English-speaking households, Cleaveland said.
The goal, according to Cleaveland, was to “understand the true experiences of Latino immigrants living in a certain area of Prince William County … [and] to understand what kind of experiences they were having since the resolution.”
Those experiences, she continued, were that “people are afraid to leave the house, people feel that if they go to work they could be picked up or deported while their children are in school, and people have abandoned their homes because of this law.”
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