Given the massive "white backlash" against immigration that led to the deeply racist Arizona bill, amid a barrage of efforts by Tea-baggers to enact similar legislation in a host of states in the coming years, this is a story that desperately needs to be broadcast on all the major media, but it flatly contradicts widely held beliefs that "everybody just knows" so so you're unlikely to have ever heard of it at all.
CU professor finds controversial link between reduced crime and rise in immigration.
Contrary to popular perception, [University of Colorado at Boulder Sociology Professor] Wadsworth found that the growth in the new immigrant population was responsible, on average, for 9.3 percent of the decline in homicide rates, and that growth in total immigration led, on average, to a 22.2 percent decrease in robbery rates. He controlled for other variables in the study, such as changes in employment, poverty, divorce, age distribution and other factors that often influence crime patterns.
The conclusion reached by researchers is clear: "everyone is really finding the same thing. There is no support for the argument that immigrants are committing more crime and that immigrants are driving up the crime rate."
This study of course includes crimes committed by ILLEGAL as well as legal immigrants, but, communities with the largest LEGAL immigrant populations happen also to be those with the largest number of ILLEGALS.
This article is from the CU Alumni Newsletter. First, the research:
Murder rates decline
The presumed link between crime and immigration is ingrained in American culture, so Wadsworth wasn’t sure what to expect when he started his research. In 1994 the murder rate began to decline and has been decreasing ever since. Sociologists credited innovative policing policies, tougher sentencing, an aging population and the end of the crack epidemic. The authors of Freakonomics (Harper Perennial) attribute the big drop to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973, which they say reduced by millions the pool of unwanted children who might have grown up to be criminals a generation later.
To test [the] controversial hypothesis, [that immigration actually REDUCES the crime rate in America] Wadsworth turned to FBI and census data from 459 cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, focusing on statistics for homicides and robberies — the two most accurately reported crimes. He measured the growth of the immigrant community over the 1990s in the selected cities, the scene of 80 percent of the country’s worst crimes.
He found the evidence quoted above: a 9.3% DECLINE in murder rates, and a 22% DECLINE in robbery rates, after eliminating other potential variables like "changes in employment, poverty, divorce, age distribution and other factors" that might explain the reduction in crime. Researchers found that immigration correlated to a sharp REDUCTION in crime statistics nationwide, but with the strongest effect in cities with the MOST immigrants.
Of course, this sharply contradicts the racist assumption that immigration = "crime-wave" that strengthens and provides the justification for punitive immigration laws like the Arizona bill. Therefore, the reaction from the wing-nuts has been fierce and unrelenting:
As to WHY this might be, possibilities range from the fact that many immigrants come from rural communities with low crime rates, many are here to support families overseas and need to obey the laws, as well as the fact that recent "immigrants have strong incentives not to step out of line in ways that might lead to incarceration or deportation."
These findings also confirm similar studies by other researchers:
Ramiro Martinez, a sociologist at Florida International University, has come to similar conclusions by studying homicide rates among Latino and immigrant communities in Miami, El Paso, San Diego, Chicago and other cities.
"San Diego, for example, is a place that captures the public imagination with all this concern about closing the borders of Mexico," he wrote in 2006. "[But] it has one of the lowest homicide rates for any major urban area in the United States.’’
Reality Has a Well-Known Liberal Bias:
"Critics accuse Wadsworth of approaching the study with a liberal bias", which is the standard way conservatives dismiss any scientific evidence they don't like "the results show evidence of liberal bias so we don't have to deal with it." That typical reaction is as old as the Catholic Church imprisoning Galileo because his results went "against church doctrine."
Wadsworth's response:"If you’re being honest with your data you try to think,‘Well, what am I leaving out? Is there something else that could be included in this model that would help explain or get rid of this finding?
"But Wadsworth says the more he tried to do that, the more persistent the findings became, and the clearer it was that this was a significant and robust relationship.
Other critics dismiss Wadsworth’s findings out of hand, including former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, who is known for his anti-immigration views.
"Any report, any kind of investigation of this particular issue and study of it is like trying to shovel smoke,’’ Tancredo told Denver’s 7News. "The statistics are incredibly varied and skewed.’’
So, you can just ignore all the evidence because Tancredo thinks the "statistics are skewed".
This response is all quite predictable. What reactionaries like Tancredo are REALLY afraid of isn't crime, it's miscegenation.
Normally, openly expressing this racism as flat opposition to integration and miscegenation is suppressed but, the recent spate of extremist tea-bag candidates has taken the gloves off.
The sponsor of Arizona's new "Papers, please" immigration is law is Republican State Sen. Russell Pearce, a politician who was caught on tape hugging a neo-Nazi.
But if you want to meet the guy who's taking credit for writing the new law, that would be Kris Kobach, a birther who's running for secretary of state in Kansas. His campaign Website brags, "Kobach wins one in Arizona." He's also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an immigration group called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, who's still listed as a member of FAIR's board of directors. Seven years after he started FAIR, Tanton wrote this, "To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?"
Meanwhile, Jim Russell the right-wing activist running for Congress in NY 18 has come out EXPLICITLY AGAINST school integration as "biological warfare" against "white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.":
While few would be as open in their racism as Jim Russell, it's clear that they CAN'T ADMIT that immigration leads to LOWER crime rates because that would utterly destroy their central cover story: "We're not racists! We just object to the immigrant crime wave sweeping our communities!"
Frankly, more needs to be done to combat this wave of racism openly pointing out the EVIDENCE. If (a certainty) that opponents simply dismiss the research they become exposed as white supremacists who oppose immigration, NOT because of concern for the law or because of a concern about crime, but because it makes America into a multi-cultural and multi-racial society, and they HATE and FEAR that!