Today's Washington Post has an important editorial on "hounding immigrants" in Prince William County. According to the Post, Prince William is "a booming jurisdiction where Hispanics, who registered scarcely 10 percent of the population in 2000, now approach 20 percent." Now, "[p]rodded by angry constituents, the county Board of Supervisors looks set to adopt a resolution whose evident purpose is to harass illegal immigrants in hopes that they move elsewhere."The editorial then describes how John T. Stirrup, Jr. (R-Gainesville), who is sponsoring that resolution, blames illegal immigrants for pretty much everything, from "economic hardship" to "lawlessness" (despite the fact that "prosecutors say most are law-abiding"). What next, immigrants cause the common cold and eat puppy dogs for breakfast? What a joke.
Worse than a joke is the concept of "denying thousands of illegal immigrant children the right to attend school." What good does that do? Yeah, driving kids onto the streets, where they will be more likely to get into trouble, makes a TON of sense. That's good ol' fashioned Republican governing philosphy if I've ever heard it: be a hard ass to others even if it hurts YOUR ass as well. Oh yeah, and encourage the economic forces (e.g., "free trade" agreements and cheap labor for big corporations) drawing illegal immigrants into this country in the first place, then "[slap] them around...once they are settled here."
As the Post concludes, that's "shameful, hypocritical and ugly." It's also quintessentially Republican: short-sighted, lacking in compassion or empathy, violating the very religious principles they claim to believe in (e.g., "The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God."), xenophobic, and just downright stupid. Heckuva job, Prince William Republicans!
Prince William County doesn't owe these illegal immigrants anything! Not health care, education or social services. Nor does any city, county or state in this country. If the Fed were doing its job, this wouldn't be an issue.
One more point, which I believe you have already made: immigration needs to be dealt with at the FEDEARL level, not by individual towns or counties. To deal with this at anything less than a national level will be futile and highly disruptive to our economy. One county makes life miserable for illegal immigrants, they move to another county. Wow, that's really doing a lot of good!
Cambridge [MA], for example, has passed a resolution declaring itself a sanctuary for immigrants, and moves are underway in other cities to follow that example.
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Police across the state have put great energy into convincing immigrants that they should report crimes without fear of drawing scrutiny from immigration authorities, said Rose and others, and empowering state troopers to enforce immigration law against undocumented immigrants who have broken no state laws would undermine that trust. Domestic violence advocates said they also feared that the agreement would make immigrant victims afraid to report those crimes.