Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Shaun Kenney now writes at the Bearing Drift, and it seems that he has it in for our county’s opposition to illegal immigration. Here is how his post, How do you cut taxes? Get rid of people (of course), starts.
Just in case anyone had any illusions of what is occurring in Prince William County, here we have a Daily Caller article on how Prince William County has cut taxes by driving out Hispanics:
“It gave us the ability to cut costs because the cost driver for the county is the school and we had such an influx of limited-English speaking students between 2002-2007 and those limited-English students are extra costly to the school system. That was the prime cost driver, the influx of those students,” Stewart said, citing the importance of being able to reduce the number of expensive English as a Second Language classes, which had increased over 250% in the previous five years.
…Read more.
As Kenney continues, it becomes clear that he thinks opposition to illegal immigration is bigotry. What follows is my response.
Kenny, instead of arguing for your own WEAK position, you are personally attacking the motives of your opponents. That is not nice, and you should know better.
Your argument against the Daily Caller‘s use of statistics is absurd. Of course statistical correlation alone does not prove causation. However, when we have good reason to believe that a decrease in one variable will result in the decrease of another, then when that correlation occurs we have every right to assume a causal relationship. Otherwise, statistical data would be of no use.
In fact, this is an excellent example of how statistics should be used. We made a change in Prince William County. The surrounding counties stood still. So the surrounding counties served as a control population. Because our crime and costs went down relative to the nearby counties, we have good reason to assume that our county’s crackdown on illegal immigration produced desirable results.
Is it a secret where most illegal immigrants come from? How do we know? Would it have anything to do with statistical observations?
Don’t we also know why illegal immigrants come here? Don’t they benefit financially? When they work to circumvent and undermine efforts to keep illegal immigrants out, don’t the employers of illegal immigrants also benefit financially? Given the poverty of most illegal immigrants (another statistical observation), their lawbreaking is perhaps understandable, but why don’t you consider the greed of employers of illegal immigrants the bigger problem?
Is the average American a bigot? No. Then why is the average American taxpayer opposed illegal immigration? Because illegal immigrants increase the cost of our opulent, government-run health, education, and welfare programs, we want illegal immigration stopped. In addition, common sense suggests that anyone who has gotten away with breaking one law is more likely to break other laws. So we quite reasonably expect ILLEGAL immigrants to bring trouble, and they do.
How does the fact that most illegal immigrants are dark-skinned change anything? Do dark-skinned people have a special rights? Does being dark-skinned change the financial equation? If illegal immigrants were green with pink and purple polka dots, they would still be here illegally, and their presence would still be costly to taxpayers.
Why are you so preoccupied with the color of illegal immigrants? Perhaps you are overcompensating. If you cannot find a better defense for illegal immigration than calling other people names, perhaps you need to more closely examine your own bigotry.
UPDATE: Kenney’s post now includes a link to this post.
UPDATE: Citizen Tom did not enjoy being called out on “step B” with regards to targeting Hispanics:
What is “step B”? This expression is Kenney’s invention. He defines it in one of the comments in his post.
There is an irony in Kenney’s characterization of his opposition. Consider how he damns the Daily Caller‘s use of statistics. He cites Wikipedia, correlation does not imply causality. Nonetheless, Kenney himself is quite ready to use a very weak correlation. Anyone who supports Prince William’s crackdown on illegal immigrants is a bigot. Where does Kenney prove that accusation?
Here is the Evaluation Study of Prince William County’s Illegal Immigration Enforcement Policy FINAL REPORT 2010 (H/T to the Daily Caller). If you are so inclined, I suggest reading the executive summary. It includes, for example, this tidbit.
Growth in the County’s Hispanic population suddenly leveled off. While Prince William County accounted for most of the growth in the metropolitan area’s Hispanic population from 2000 to 2006, since the policy’s introduction nearly all Hispanic growth in the metro area has occurred outside of Prince William.
The number of non-citizens in the County decreased substantially (by about 7,400 persons in two years).
Using a series of proxy measures (such as limited English proficiency, number of young Hispanic males) that all point in the same direction, we are also able to conclude that the number of illegal immigrants was significantly reduced. We estimate that this number decreased by an amount between 2,000 and 6,000 persons from 2006 to 2008. We believe that both the policy and the changing economy contributed to this decrease, but the immigration policy surely played a role because the rate of changes in these same proxy measures is so much smaller elsewhere in the metropolitan area.
The Hispanic population of the County was restructured, as unattached young adults (mostly male) left and were replaced by Hispanic couples, somewhat older adults, and families with small children, all more likely to be English speakers.
The main effect of the crackdown seems to be the one we all desired. Illegal immigrants now have little desire to come here.
