Fairfax County’s plan to quantify its illegal immigrant population is nearly impossible, leaders on both sides of Northern Virginia’s battle over undocumented workers agree.
“They would just as well go to a Ouija board,” said John Liss, executive director of the Alexandria-based Tenants and Workers United, who said issues of civil liberties, privacy and racial profiling would stymie any attempt to conduct an accurate count.
County Executive Anthony Griffin earlier this month ordered his staff to do just that, however, following an inquiry into the county’s actions to combat illegal immigration from Sully District Supervisor Michael Frey.
Griffin asked for not only the number of those Fairfax residents not legally present in the United States, but a list of government services the county must legally provide them.
“It’s next to impossible to get an accurate estimate [of illegal immigrants], only because of the whole nature of the problem: It’s an underground problem, it’s an underground issue,” said Prince William County Board of Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart, a Republican who has emerged as perhaps the region’s most outspoken opponent of illegal immigration.
Stewart this week led the county board in passing a controversial seven-man unit that will target law-breaking illegal immigrants, which will train police to check the legal status of those stopped for traffic violation or arrested for misdemeanors.
The consensus on the impossibility of Fairfax’s plan represents a rare point of agreement between the two bitterly divided sides.
The county is refusing to disclose its methodology for such a census, citing an exemption for an executive’s “working papers” in the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
“We are using the appropriate methods to get information that is available to answer the request by the county executive,” said County spokeswoman Merni Fitzgerald.
“I don’t see how they can do it, it doesn’t make sense,” said John Steinbach, a coordinator of the Woodbridge Workers Committee, which is affiliated with immigrant-rights group Mexicanos Sin Fronteras.
The only way such a review would be possible, he said, would be if undocumented immigrants could be convinced to voluntarily offer up information on their legal status, which is not likely.
