Fairfax County responds well to immigration

The number of illegal immigrants in Virginia rose to 210,000 this year, making the state home to the 12th largest population of illegal immigrants nationwide.
While counties such as Loudoun and Prince William have created measures to deny illegal immigrants services and allow police to ask the legal status of individuals, Fairfax has not followed suit. In fact, the policies towards illegal immigrants in Fairfax County are so lenient that the area appears at the top of several online lists of “sanctuary communities.”
There is no doubt that despite the large number of illegal immigrants, the county is thriving and also has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
The success of the county despite its large number of illegal immigrants is due largely to the way that the county handles them. The U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) uses the Secure Communities program to identify and convict criminal aliens who have committed Class I offenses (which include murder, rape and drug trafficking). After these criminals serve their sentence, they are immediately deported. Children of these illegal immigrants and those who have not committed crimes are not deported.
President Obama’s new immigration reform similarly focuses on “the removal of individuals who pose a national security or public safety risk,” according to the White House website.
This new reform offers a very practical solution. Though many politicians believe that allowing illegal immigrants in the U.S. would be costly, deporting illegal immigrants is as well.
According to a 2010 report by Center for American Progress and Rob Paral and Associates, it would cost $285 billion to deport all of the illegal immigrants in the United States.
There are also moral implications of deportation to consider: is it right to deport someone who has lived in this country since childhood, someone who knows no other home?
President Obama’s reform is valuable because it will remove the threat of deportation for illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children.