The Washington area continued to see a rise in the percentage of Hispanic residents last year, except for Prince William County, where elected officials instituted stringent anti-illegal-immigration measures.
Prince William, which began its crackdown against illegal immigrants in March 2008, had a net growth of 189 Hispanic residents after adding an average of 6,000 Hispanic residents a year from 2000 to 2007, according to new census data. The county went from being 9.7 percent Hispanic to 19.3 percent Hispanic from 2000 to 2007, and dropped to 19.1 percent Hispanic in 2008.
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The county’s overall population grew by 5,146 last year, a far cry from earlier this decade when the county saw periods of net growth of 12,000 people a year.
In October 2007, the county passed a resolution granting broad powers to police officers to question residents’ immigration status, which they began using in March. A second version, which went into effect in July, limited those police powers to people who had been arrested.
Lisa Johnson-Firth, a Manassas immigration lawyer, said the county’s new policy toward illegal immigrants encouraged Hispanic residents, no matter their legal status, to leave the county, and had been a deterrent for Latinos to move to the county. She said the slowing economy also has played a part.
“There’s not as much work in Prince William as there had been,” Johnson-Firth said.
Regionwide, the proportion of Hispanics to the overall population grew, even in Alexandria and Arlington County, where those numbers had been in decline for many years.
Montgomery and Prince George’s County saw a continued steady increase in their Hispanic populations in 2008. Prince George’s County’s overall population fell by 4,466 people in 2008 as its black, white and Asian populations declined.
There’s no clear reason why there has been a steady increase in Hispanic residents in suburban Maryland compared with overall decreases in some Virginia jurisdictions, said Mark Mather, a demographer with the nonpartisan Population Reference Bureau.
But Mather said a greater availability of affordable housing and “more welcoming” immigration policies in Maryland may have played a part. Maryland is one of the few states in the country that allows illegal immigrants to have state driver’s licenses.
Mather said the Hispanic population was growing “relatively fast” in the mid-Atlantic region compared with the nation as a whole, where the growth rate has slowed. A relatively strong economy, Mather said, may explain why.