Jackson Free Press

By conventional wisdom, El Paso, Texas, should be one of the scariest cities in America. In 2007, the city's poverty rate was a shade over 27 percent, more than twice the national average. Median household income was $35,600, well below the national average of $48,000. El Paso is three-quarters Hispanic, and more than a quarter of its residents are foreign-born. Given that it's nearly impossible for low-skilled immigrants to work in the United States legitimately, it's safe to say that a significant percentage of El Paso's foreign-born population is living here illegally.

El Paso also has some of the laxer gun control policies of any non-Texan big city in the country, mostly due to gun-friendly state law. And famously, El Paso sits just over the Rio Grande from one of the most violent cities in the western hemisphere, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, home to a staggering 2,500 homicides in the last 18 months alone. A city of illegal immigrants with easy access to guns, just across the river from a metropolis ripped apart by brutal drug war violence. Should be a bloodbath, right?

Here's the surprise: There were just 18 murders in El Paso last year, in a city of 736,000 people. To compare, Baltimore, with 637,000 residents, had 234 killings. In fact, since the beginning of 2008, there were nearly as many El Pasoans murdered while visiting Juarez (20) than there were murdered in their hometown (23).

El Paso is among the safest big cities in America. For the better part of the last decade, only Honolulu has had a lower violent crime rate (El Paso slipped to third last year, behind New York). Men's Health magazine recently ranked El Paso the second "happiest" city in America, right after Laredo, Texas—another border town, where the Hispanic population is approaching 95 percent.

So how has this city of poor immigrants become such an anomaly? Actually, it may not be an anomaly at all. Many criminologists say El Paso isn't safe despite its high proportion of immigrants; it's safe because of them.

"If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population," says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. "If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you're likely in one of the country's safer cities. San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they're some of the safest places in the country."

If you regularly listen to talk radio, or get your crime news from anti-immigration pundits, all of this may come as a surprise. But it's not to many of those who study crime for a living. As the national immigration debate heated up in 2007, dozens of academics who specialize in the issue sent a letter to then President George W. Bush and congressional leaders with the following point:

Numerous studies by independent researchers and government commissions over the past 100 years repeatedly and consistently have found that, in fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or to be behind bars than are the native-born. This is true for the nation as a whole, as well as for cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami, and cities along the U.S.-Mexico border such as San Diego and El Paso.

Opponents of illegal immigration usually do little more than cite anecdotes attempting to link illegal immigration to violent crime. When they do try to use statistics, they come up short. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), for example, has perpetuated the popular myth that illegal immigrants murder 12 Americans per day, and kill another 13 by driving drunk. King says his figures come from a Government Accountability Office study he requested, which found that about 27 percent of inmates in the federal prison system are non-citizens. Colorado Media Matters looked into King's claim, and found his methodology lacking. King appears to have conjured his talking point by simply multiplying the annual number of murders and DWI fatalities in America by 27 percent. Of course, the GAO report only looked at federal prisons, not the state prisons and local jails where most convicted murderers and DWI offenders are kept. The Bureau of Justice Statistics puts the number of non-citizens (including legal immigrants) in state, local, and federal prisons and jails at about 6.4 percent. Of course, even that doesn't mean that non-citizens account for 6.4 percent of murders and DWI fatalities, only 6.4 percent of the overall inmate population.

What's happening with Latinos is true of most immigrant groups throughout U.S. history. "Overall, immigrants have a stake in this country, and they recognize it," Northeastern University's Levin says. "They're really an exceptional sort of American. They come here having left their family and friends back home. They come at some cost to themselves in terms of security and social relationships. They are extremely success-oriented, and adjust very well to the competitive circumstances in the United States." Economists Kristin Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl argue that the very process of migration tends to select people with a low potential for criminality.

Despite the high profile of polemicists such as Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage, America has been mostly welcoming to this latest immigration wave. You don't see "Latinos Need Not Apply" or "No Mexicans" signs posted on public buildings the way you did with the Italians and the Irish, two groups who actually were disproportionately likely to turn to crime. The implication makes sense: An immigrant group's propensity for criminality may be partly determined by how they're received in their new country.

"Look at Arab-Americans in the Midwest, especially in the Detroit area," Levin says. "The U.S. and Canada have traditionally been very willing to welcome and integrate them. They're a success story, with high average incomes and very little crime. That's not the case in Europe. Countries like France and Germany are openly hostile to Arabs. They marginalize them. And they've seen waves of crime and rioting."

El Paso may be a concentrated affirmation of that theory. In 2007, the Washington Post reported on city leaders' wariness of anti-immigration policies coming out of Washington. The city went to court (and lost) in an effort to prevent construction of the border fence within its boundaries, and local officials have resisted federal efforts to enlist local police for immigration enforcement, arguing that it would make illegals less likely to cooperate with police. "Most people in Washington really don't understand life on the border," El Paso Mayor John Cook told the Post. "They don't understand our philosophy here that the border joins us together, it doesn't separate us."

Other mayors could learn something from Cook. El Paso's embrace of its immigrants might be a big reason why the low-income border town has remained one of the safest places in the country.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of Reason magazine, where this story appeared originally. Read his column here every Tuesday.

Previous Comments

ID

149620

Comment

Very interesting. I didn't realize El Paso was that safe, despite the very violent Ciudad Juarez being right across the Rio Grande. And only 18 murders in the city of that size says a lot. I'm also happy that this article was written because immigrants are always being blamed for things that negatively impacts a community, but rarely credited for good things.

Author

golden eagle

Date

2009-07-14T14:14:13-06:00

ID

149623

Comment

Radley, as a real libertarian, doesn't pander to the left or the right. It's going to be great having his column each week (in the Daily on Tuesdays).

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2009-07-14T14:33:22-06:00

ID

149630

Comment

Outstanding! Radley Balko is a most welcomed addition to the JFP Nation! Balko and Reason have been reporting on problems in the Mississippi criminal justice system for some time, particularly Drs. Steven Hayne and Michael West. If you have not yet seen it, I recommend to all that you watch the 2009 Oxford Film Festival Award Winning Short Documentary 'The Mississippi Drug War Blues', by Reason.tv and Drew Carey, about the Cory Maye case and "Saving An Innocent Man From Death Row", an interview with Balko about his research on that case.

Author

Macedonian

Date

2009-07-14T23:53:44-06:00

ID

149795

Comment

EXCELLENT, OBJECTIVE PIECE! Also a great follow up to a recent show on Brad 'Kaz' Franklin's, 'A Closer Look' where a host of stakeholders vigorously debated the issue of undocument foreign-born workers and immigration. To me the only consensus reached was that we need a CHANGE in the system. I believe that change beginning with a CHANGE IN PERCEPTIONS driven by well-researched, data-based information such as in Radley Balko's writing. Hey Kaz, how about a follow up show tackling each specific view point from a legal and procedural basis. From the panel discussion, it was evident that each stakeholder had an opinion based upon each's personal experience in the matter. Although none was necessarily invalid, it was a discomforting to know that despite the visibility of the issue, there is no real information available. For instance, I could tell from the responses by one of the journalists in panel that hu had absolutely not concept of the actual process of becoming a documented immigrant/worker and hence hu's ideas were very lopesided to push a particular agenda. Well done JFP!!!!

Author

Do No Evil

Date

2009-07-18T12:56:50-06:00

ID

149800

Comment

Do No Evil. One of our most lively shows indeed. And there will be a follow up soon. Thanks for listening

Author

Kamikaze

Date

2009-07-18T15:39:48-06:00