PART ONE
http://reason.com/archives/2009/07/06/the-el-paso-miracle
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 finda 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 (pdf) 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.
And what about those so-scary stats on illegal aliens in US prison?
Here's the reality
Opponents of illegal immigration usually do little more than cite andecdotes 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 (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.
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Anti-immigration fanatics blame immigrants for crime! But maybe it's the anti-immigration fanatics who are the ones to blame for immigrant crime! They indirectly encourage native-borns to pick on immigrants, which then make immigrants feel that they need to team up into a gang to defend themselves! And being in a gang ends up bringing in more drama then the members expected before they joined!
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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."
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PART TWO
And what about those Mexican gangs in LA? Most of them are born in the US! Mexican-American gangs been in LA since the 1930's. That means the grandkids and great-grandkids of the 1930's era- Chicano gangstaz are US BORN! DUH!
Here's what University of Southern California researcher Alex Alonso wrote
http://www.streetgangs.com/lies/illegal_090909/
As a gang researcher the issue of illegal immigration comes up often when being interviewed or asked to opine on the subject of Los Angeles gangs. For some, illegal immigration is a major reason why street gangs exisit, but the reality is that most gang members, including Hispanics, are US citizens. Ironically, in over 150 court cases and probably close to 200 (I have never kept a precise count but my assistant is helping organize all my previous cases) that I have consulted on in court, the issue of illegal immigration has never come up. In all my criminal cases, I have had only 12 defendants that were not born in the United States (I still have to look over some older cases), and of those 12, they all immigrated to the US as children before the age of 7 with either a parent or a family member.
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In other words, they came in when they were too young to be recruited into a gang. And most of the people I knew who immigrated to the US as little children are so Americanized that by the time they started high school, that they don't even associated with newly arrived immigrants from the same country! This is common sense to anyone attending schools with large immigrant populations!
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I asked Sheriff Lee Baca, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, what was the percent of the incarcerated gang member population and his response was that it was less than 10 percent. At an event for the slain high school football star, Jamiel Shaw Jr., attendees where extremely unhappy that the alleged assailant, Pedro Espinoza, was not a US citizen and that he should have been deported on his previous arrest in 2007. One disgruntled attendee falsely believed that 90 percent of gang members were illegal citizens. I wondered how many others actually believed the rhetoric and propaganda from anti immigrant (or anti illegal immigrant) representatives. It is this misinformation that inspired, Hector Tobar, writer from the Los Angeles Times, to challenge some of the most ridiculous claims made against illegal immigrants being circulated in an email. Last year I traced down a quote that falsely stated 80 percent of the 18th Street gang membership in Los Angeles was in the US illegally, but after tracing the source of this quote, I found a dead end, suggesting that it was completely fabricated and Tobar found the same in his research.
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In the same article Alex Alonso and Hector Tobar then exposed more lies promoted by the anti-immigration fanatics, they concluded
Obviously, the ability to speak a language other than English, or the desire to listen to Spanish music, doesn’t make you an illegal immigrant or a threat to U.S. democracy. It’s a slur against Los Angeles, really, to find these items on a list of “problems” caused by illegal immigration.--
The authors of the chain e-mail and the phony government report fear what Los Angeles has become — a multilingual, multiethnic city with multicultural tastes.
They search for information to persuade others to be afraid, but the actual numbers don’t quite add up to the big monster they think is out there.
So they make the numbers bigger. Or they just make them up. And they spread them around until all that fear and anger turns into a big hate.
