Hundreds of foreign-born families have pulled their children from Prince William County public schools and enrolled them in nearby Fairfax and Arlington Counties, “imposing a new financial burden on those inner suburbs in a time of lean budgets,” reports Amy Gardner with the Washington Post.
Normally, I find Gardner to be a pretty fair reporter, but her biases are showing in the way she framed this story. “The school-to-school migration within Northern Virginia started,” she explained, “just as Prince William began implementing rules to deny some services to illegal immigrants and require police to check the immigration status of crime suspects thought to be in the country illegally.”
Only lower in the story does the fact emerge that Prince William County expects to save $6 million a year thanks to a 759-student decline in the number of students enrolled in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs.
One of the biggest question marks in the debate over illegal immigration is how much illegals are costing citizens and legal residents in public services, most notably health care and ESOL programs. Now we have data suggesting that the ESOL costs are pretty significant. But rather than leading with a positive spin — Prince William County policies are paying off during a time of economic hardship as illegal immigrants move out — Gardner chose to lead with a negative: the cost that Prince William was imposing on its neighbors. And she did so despite evidence in her own story that the impact of the migration was so diffused that Fairfax and Arlington officials didn’t even regard the shift as a hardship.
To my mind, the real story is the hard data it provides on the immigration debate, which has been conducted so far in a largely data-free void. To her credit, Gardner did pick up on this point, noting that the evidence of migration has been largely anecdotal until now and that data from school systems provides “the most concrete evidence to date that a significant exodus of immigrants is underway — and that most of those leaving are settling in neighboring communities.” But she didn’t pursue that angle very far.
There’s another interesting angle that Gardner could have pursued in the story, based on a quote from Prince William County board chairman Corey Stewart: “Stewart called those jurisdictions ‘sanctuary’ cities and counties, saying illegal immigrants are welcome there.”
The Washington Post has focused its coverage overwhelmingly on Prince William County’s policies, which have been hostile to illegal immigrants. There has been far less coverage of the policies of Arlington and Fairfax, which have been far more accepting. Stewart makes a significant charge: that Arlington and Fairfax function as sanctuaries for illegals. That charge may or may not be grounded in the facts. It would be interesting to know what the facts are.
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