Virginia has a rapidly growing illegal alien population of about 295,000 persons, nearly tripling since 2000. Since 2000, the state’s foreign-born population has grown by 46.5 percent while its native-born population has grown by 6.5 percent. Similarly, public school enrollment of students who require special instruction in English has also soared, rising by nearly 175 percent over the last decade.

Virginia’s illegal alien population represents a major burden on the state’s taxpayers and on the state budget. These costs imposed on law-abiding Virginians are unfair and unwelcome even in the best of times, but are especially burdensome at a time when the state is confronting a major general fund budget deficit of $1.1 billion.

In 2008, the foreign-born population in Virginia represented nearly one in every nine residents (10.8%), and illegal aliens constitute about one-third (34%) of that immigrant population. Children with at least one immigrant parent accounted for 8.7 percent of the population in 1990, 13.2 percent in 2000, and 17.6 percent of children under age 18 in 2007.

Virginia’s illegal immigrant population costs the state’s taxpayers nearly $1.7 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. The annual fiscal burden amounts to about $625 per Virginia household headed by a native-born resident. Even if the estimated taxes collected from illegal immigrant workers are treated as an offset to this fiscal cost — which, as we explain later, makes little sense — net outlays still amount to about $1.5 billion per year.

This information fills a gap noted by the Governor’s Commission on Immigration, established in 2007. Its stated purpose was to study “…the costs and benefits of immigration on the Commonwealth…Specifically, …the impact of immigration on education, health care, law enforcement, local demands for services and the economy…â€