Twisted Priorities

In Prince William County, bashing illegal immigrants skews public spending.

LAST JUNE researchers from the University of Virginia asked residents of Prince William County what issues rankled them the most. Just 3.2 percent of respondents cited illegal immigrants as their chief complaint; about the same number said they wished they could get to the grocery store more quickly. So it may come as a surprise to the other 96.8 percent of residents that the county will soon be spending more of its money on harassing illegal immigrants than on building roads, protecting the elderly, helping at-risk kids or promoting public health. Welcome to the twisted politics of Virginia's second-most-populous jurisdiction.

In launching its mean-spirited crackdown on illegal immigrants, which began last week, the Board of County Supervisors has elected to spend $6.4 million in the first year -- a down payment on a program expected to cost about $26 million over the next five years. To generate the revenue needed in Year One, the county will have to increase property taxes for homeowners by 3 cents per $100 of assessed value. That means the owner of a $340,000 house (the county's average assessment) will be ponying up $103 more next year so that illegal immigrants -- many of them employed, paying taxes and supporting families -- can be targeted. Budgets are a reflection of priorities, and Prince William's are badly out of whack, particularly as the county struggles with plunging revenue and an anemic housing market. The crackdown's $6.4 million price in the next fiscal year is more than the county has budgeted from its general fund for transportation improvements ($4.2 million), public health ($5.2 million) or its office on aging ($3.7 million).

The high price of bashing immigrants is due partly to the police department's realization that the new policy will make it a likely target for discrimination lawsuits by Hispanic plaintiffs alleging racial profiling. To defend themselves, the police have insisted that they equip their patrol cars with cameras to videotape arrests and devote extra personnel to monitoring the recordings. In addition, the county expects to spend millions of dollars not just to detain illegal immigrants once they are arrested, but to farm them out to other jails in the probable event that the county's own jail is full.

Acting with apparent urgency, Prince William's elected supervisors have also opted to drain $800,000 from the county's reserve fund to get the program up and running before the new fiscal year starts July 1. That leaves the fund all but empty, which will make things that much trickier if the county faces an unforeseen emergency in the next few months.

The county board's haste seems less a response to popular demand than to the political agenda and timing of its baldly ambitious chairman, Corey A. Stewart, who has launched a campaign for lieutenant governor. Mr. Stewart, a Republican who has been running for one office or another nearly every year since he moved to Prince William in 2001, has by demagoguery transformed a relatively harmonious county into a hotbed of intolerance. That is the platform on which he evidently hopes to base his current race, and no wonder, since he has largely ignored the issues on which he was originally elected -- traffic, growth and development. It is a wretched legacy for Mr. Stewart, and a dishonor for the county's 380,000 residents.