From today’s Washington Post:
Hundreds of foreign-born families have pulled their children from Prince William County public schools and enrolled them in nearby Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria since the start of the school year, imposing a new financial burden on those inner suburbs in a time of lean budgets.
(…)
“The resolution is clearly working,” said Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. “It is driving down the non-English-speaking portion of the schools and saving us millions of dollars. They’re going to other jurisdictions and costing them money.”
This is pretty much the reason I didn’t support the so-called Rule of Law Resolution from the beginning, and why I’ve had my doubts about the BOCS’s, or rather should I say Corey Stewart’s, obsession with this issue.
I’ve always had this feeling that this isn’t really about illegal immigrants so much as it is about immigrants in general, and Hispanic immigrants specifically, even if they’re here legally.
Stewart’s quote would seem to confirm that.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Since the school system doesn’t collect information about legal status, the only somewhat coincident factor to measure is ESOL enrollment levels in the absence of anything better. It’s pretty clear that illegal aliens don’t take extensive English language courses before unlawfully coming to the United States, and the explosion of ESOL students happened at the same time we saw a huge uptick in the number of illegal aliens in the county. ESOL enrollments and the number of illegal aliens in the community are clearly related.
Given the demographics in Prince William County, if illegal aliens are leaving it’s obvious that there would be a corresponding decrease in the number of students requiring (expensive) ESOL support in the schools. It’s one of the most available measures of success largely because there just aren’t any other relevant statistical measures available. Noting that as predicted there is a decrease in ESOL enrollments simply is the only way to demonstrate that illegal aliens are leaving.
I wish we had a better handle on who is here legally and who is not, but since we don’t survey residents on this question at all, we have to use the measures that are available, as imperfect as they are.
If Corey Stewart had different sources of statistics available, I’ve no doubt he would have used them. There aren’t, and you can’t blame him to using the only statistics that actually are available.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
If the immigrants were Russian, or French, or any other white culture that does not speak English, the situation would be no different. It’s easy to point at people and cry racist when you look hard enough for it.
Accommodating a second language is pretty expensive, apparently. How much money should the taxpayers invest in it, when it’s going to accommodate a large percentage of people that are illegally here?