From The Washington Post:

A Northern Virginia developer is proceeding carefully with a controversial plan to create a day-laborer site behind his Centreville shopping center. But the proposal faces a long road ahead, its supporters say, after a heated meeting Tuesday night that included hundreds of residents and shopkeepers who oppose the idea.

Albert J. Dwoskin, owner of the McLean-based firm A.J. Dwoskin and Associates, needs to file applications for a building permit and minor site plan, said Brian Worthy, a Fairfax County spokesman. The proposal does not require approval by the county’s Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors and mirrors the requirements imposed on a similarly contentious plan for a town-funded day-laborer center in 2006 in Herndon. The site at Centreville Square Shopping Center would be funded by Dwoskin and be run as a nonprofit organization by the Centreville Immigration Forum, a group of churches.

“We’ll go ahead and continue to look at it because it is an option and I think it is a reasonable solution,” Dwoskin said after the meeting.

Dwoskin and Supervisor Michael R. Frey said they would conduct more research on the plan in the wake of the sometimes-boisterous town hall-style meeting in the cafeteria of Centreville’s Centre Ridge Elementary School. About 300 people attended the two-hour meeting, along with at least four television crews and dozens of activists on both sides of the immigration debate.

Let me go on the record: this is a ridiculous idea. Yes, the developer will privately fund this center, but it sends the wrong message to illegal aliens and advocates of amnesty. It effectively sanctions this type of behavior and sends the message that illegal immigration is acceptable. We are (supposed to be) a nation of laws. Greg Letiecq over at Black Velvet Bruce Li has a great post on this subject and an outstanding recap of the meeting.

Greg writes,

Supervisor Frey and the shopping center property owner both tried to explain that the only two options were supposedly to let illegal alien day laborers continue to congregate where they are, or provide a day laborer center for them. A local open borders group then tried to bat clean-up making it very obvious that there wasn’t any intent to obtain community input here but to simply assuage public opinion somehow so this done deal could go forward and the ’smart’ people be entrusted to make decisions for the community. That didn’t resolve concerns, it just seemed to feed them.

Supervisor Frey also took a stab at trying to explain why he wasn’t going to consider any actions along the lines of Prince William County’s Rule of Law Resolution, mischaracterizing what we did here in this county to such a degree that it demonstrated either utter incompetence on the subject or willful intent to lie. Seeing how he also incongruously claimed that the day labor center in Herndon a few years back “worked” at solving a problem rather than enraging the community to throw out just about every elected official who supported it, I’m just going to lean towards the latter. At any rate, it gave me an opportunity to deliver my impression of Representative Joe Wilson, which seemed to amuse some folks.

We have more than two options in dealing with this problem, despite what Supervisor Michael Frey or anyone else (including the President of the United States) might say. We can enforce our immigration laws. There is a process for coming into this country legally. Those who elect to circumvent this process are breaking the law. That is a fact. We can resist the push by some to forsake our laws and fundamentally alter this country. I care about my community in Centreville. Sure, this project–a double-wide trailer stuffed behind a Giant Supermarket–will be privately funded. But what about the next one? A couple of towns away, in Herndon, VA, a day-laborer center was built using the hard-earned money of taxpayers.

It is unfortunate that Republican Supervisor Michael Frey supports this effort. Building a day-laborer trailer center and locating it behind a shopping plaza simply isn’t the way to solve this problem. This “solution” only exacerbates the problem. We should look to our neighbors in Prince William County who, under the leadership of Corey Stewart, have significantly reigned in their problem with illegal aliens.