In the 2011 Virginia General Assembly session, two bills related to illegal immigration should get a look. House Bill 1775 patroned by Gilbert will “amend and reenact § 22.1-3.1 of the Code of Virginia and to amend the Code of Virginia by adding a section numbered 2.2-208.01, relating to the immigration status of the parents of enrolled students.”

It is estimated that Virginia’s illegal alien population is about 295,000. This has nearly tripled since 2000. While our citizen population has grown only by 6.5 percent, Virginia’s foreign-born population has grown by a whopping 46.5 percent. Those foreign-born represented just over 10% of our residents in 2008. The population of children with immigrant parents (at least one) has doubled from 8.7% in 1990 to 17.6% in 2007.

Estimates state that about 8% of K-12 public school students in our state are children of illegal immigrants, with 75% of them attending in Northern Virginia. Virginia taxpayers foot the bill for educating these children. Children’s parents must prove residency in a school district, not citizenship. Regardless, ALL children, are permitted access to our public schools and House Bill 1775 will not exclude any child based upon a parent’s lack of citizenship documentation as this would violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

If we are educating as many as 95,000 children of illegal immigrants, the estimated cost is upwards of 1.5 billion dollars! Of that, over $400,000 is spent on special English instruction classes. While these illegal residents pay state and local taxes, the offset can be ruled irrelevant. One must assume that someone else would do the job if the illegal were not. It is just as equally likely that a legal employee would pay the same taxes or more.

Since passage of the controversial Arizona immigration law that requires law enforcement to inquire about a subject’s immigration status, a number of localities around the country have met significant resistance to enacting policies or legislation similar to HB1421. The Maryland state school board prevented Frederick County from identifying student’s immigration status in school records. The school commissioners merely wished to document the cost of educating the rising tide of immigrant students. This Maryland county system saw the number of students requiring special English classes rise over 12% from 2007 to 2008. For the same reason, Oklahoma also sought to gather such information from schools. Arizona also drafted similar legislation.

Another immigration-related bill is House Bill 1421 which reads, “No locality, or employee of a locality, acting in his official capacity, may limit or restrict the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law.” This legislation appears to inhibit the establishment of so-called “sanctuary cities” that purposefully ignore the citizenship status of residents. Nearly 50 U.S. localities have been identified as sanctuaries for illegal immigrants. It is estimated that as many as 200 localities have policies in practice to protect illegal immigrants. Many states including Tennessee, Georgia, and, of course, Arizona have anti-sanctuary laws.

Write or call to your State delegate and senator asking them to support these important bills. You can follow the bills here: http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?111+sum+HB1421 http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?111+sum+HB1775

Other sources:

http://www.fairus.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=20703&security=1601&news_iv_ctrl=2061

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?111+ful+HB1421+pdf