Full Disclosure what follows is an edited version. Search The El Paso Miracle for the FULL ARTICLE
One of the safest big
cities in America?
RADLEY BALKO Reason Magazine| 7.6.2009
12:15 PM
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, … it's safe to say that a
significant percentage [are] living here illegally. 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. El Paso 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.
El Paso is among the
safest big cities in America. For the better part of the last decade.(It slipped to third
last year.) 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 get your crime
news from talk radio anti-immigration pundits, all of this may come as a
surprise. But it's not that way to many of those who study crime for a living. 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, Laredo, and El Paso.
One of the signatories
[See full article]was Rubén G. Rumbaut,
a sociologist who studies immigration at the University of
California, Irvine. Rumbaut recently
presented a paper on immigration and crime to a Washington, D.C. conference
sponsored by the Police Foundation. Rumbaut writes via email, "The evidence points overwhelmingly to the same conclusion: Rates of crime and conviction for undocumented immigrants are far below those for
the native born, and that is especially
the case for violent crimes, including murder."
Opponents of illegal
immigration cite anecdotes to link illegal immigration to violent crime. When they do try to use
statistics, they come up short. 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 (pdf).
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 [according to] [e]conomists Kristin Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl argue that
the very process of migration tends to select for people with a low
potential for criminality.
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 the 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 the 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."
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.
