Presence of Immigrants Still Correlates With Low Crime!

It’s pretty amazing that no matter how many times people point this out, no matter how many times local police say that Arizona’s new immigration law is bad for them, apparently no one can hear it. The murder rate in a number of border towns-including San Diego, El Paso and Tuscon (which is not really a border town in the same way El Paso is)-actually dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009. In fact, El Paso and San Diego both made the most-recent top five list of large American cities with low violent crime rates. If you really crunch some numbers, you find that the states with the most “illegal immigrants” actually have the lowest per capita incidences of violent crime. (Now Philly: that’s a place you don’t want to be.) Even when you look at a longer time period than year-over-year, you see that Arizona has 15% less violent crime overall since 2006. This makes the insane ramblings of anti-immigration folks all the more annoying-especially because most of them are probably Irish people whose parents came here and took a job away from some real white person.