The Washington Post laments Price William County, VA’s enforcement of the immigration laws and the devastating effect it’s having on the community;
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.
Horrible, ain’t it?
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.
Anecdotes of the trend outstrip hard statistical evidence, yet there are clear signs that the county’s Latino population has reversed its pace of rapid growth. County officials said there are 4,000 to 7,000 vacant homes in the county. Trustee notices fill the classified section of area newspapers, chronicling the steady, staggering forfeiture of properties by homeowners with Hispanic surnames such as Mendez, Lozano, Medina and Rodriguez.
Last month, there were 776 foreclosure recordings in the Prince William County, Manassas, Manassas Park area, court records show, up from 244 in June 2007 and 19 in June 2006.
So because illegal immigrants are packing up and walking away from their mortgages, that’s bad? The post tries hard to make the case that these were all just legal Hispanic immigrants who were scared off by the evil, racist white people, but that’s hardly the case.
What did Prince William County do to scare these people off? They did two simple things – they closed their Day Labor Center and they made police check the immigration status of everyone they arrested for other crimes. How racist, huh?
The Post would have us believe that would scare away legal immigrants. It shouldn’t even scare away illegal immigrants if they intended to not break the law.
Hispanic ILLEGAL immigrants are leaving Prince William….. There. Fixed.
I don’t see what the problem is. You play, you pay. We should be doing more of that here in Raliegh. Because I gotta tell you, they come knocking on my door for work and I tell em they better run, cause if they only ask for cash- I know why. Too f-ing bad.
That others pay thousands to be here legally AND learn english and adapt as true naturalized citizens is where I pay my respects. Otherwise, no cigar.