Opponents of immigration reform are fond of saying illegal immigrants bring with them a crime spree. Arizona Senator John McCain claimed earlier this year that illegals in Arizona and a porous border “has led to violence—the worst I have ever seen.”
Fellow Arizonian, Gov. Jan Brewer has also capitalized on that meme: she insisted that her state’s controversial immigration law would curb “border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration.” These proclamations, however, are more than misleading; they’re straight-up wrong.
Despite what conservatives would like us to believe, there’s no correlation between illegal immigration and crime. On the contrary, studies show that cities with robust immigrant communities actually have lower levels of homicide and robbery. A recent study Tim Wadsworth from the University of Colorado at Boulder took a look at crime rates in American cities with high levels of foreign-born and new immigrants and found that crime rates actually went down between 1990 and 2000.
“Cities that experienced greater growth in immigrant or new-immigrant populations between 1990 and 2000 tended to demonstrate sharper decreases in homicide and robbery,” asserts Wadsworth in his study. “The suggestion that high levels of immigration may have been partially responsible for the drop in crime during the 1990s seems plausible.”
Wadsworth isn’t the only person touting such statistics. Clarence Dupnik, the Sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, told the Arizona Republic that he and his force have seen no spike in violent crime related to illegal immigrants. “This is a media-created event,” he said. “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”
Furthermore, back in 2006, Harvard sociology professor Robert Sampson compared crime rates in Chicago and found that Mexican-Americans had far lower criminal inclination than their white and black counterparts. “The first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45% less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background,” he asserted in the New York Times. “Second-generation immigrants were 22% less likely to commit violence than the third generation.”
As if that’s not enough, the FBI declared this year that four border states — El Paso, Austin, San Diego and Phoenix — have some of the lowest crime rates in the nation. So, Republicans, what do you have to say to that?
Xenophobia and anti-Latino hate crimes will continue to flourish in the United States if we allow McCain, Brewer and their conservative peers to disseminate libelous allegations against illegal immigrants. To blame one social group for wide-spread ills does this nation no favors. In fact, it only hurts our “melting pot” image, and depletes our nation’s democratic ideals. In fact, it perverts them into something more closely resembling a fascist state. And surely Republicans don’t want that…
Image via Fibonacci Blue’s Flickr.
August 26, 2010 at 9:51 am, From Ken Mehlman’s Coming Out, Insight into GOP Politics | Death and Taxes said:
[...] As with gays, illegal immigrants have erroneously been blamed for various civic ills, such as violent crime, and are described in the most detestable [...]