How Immigrants Make You Safer

God love the libertarians.  I may not agree with them on gun control or regulation of industry, but we see pretty much eye to eye on immigration and the criminal justice system.  Radley Balko writes at Reason.com about one of the safest cities in America: El Paso, TX.

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.

That's a story you probably missed during the frenzy of border violence reporting earlier this year.  Balko continues:

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."

Balko urges people who care about public policy not to get their facts on immigration and crime from talk radio, but instead from people who study crime or enforce the law.  Those experts know that immigration tends to drive crime down, not up.  (Meanwhile, restrictionists like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and William Gheen struggle with basic math.)

That is why police chiefs of big cities with immigrant populations favor immigration reform and oppose programs that devolve immigration enforcement duties to local law enforcement.  But until public perception of the relation between immigration and crime catches up to reality, immigration reform will be hamstrung by misinformation on this issue promoted by restrictionist groups and circulated by their media enablers.