The 'Dangerous' Border: Actually One of America's Safest Places

[pampango]

Source: Time

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1814377_1723618,00.html

When U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled on Wednesday that key provisions of Arizona's new anti-immigration law were unconstitutional, she could have also declared them unnecessary. That is, if the main impetus behind the controversial legislation was, as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said when she signed it in April, "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration." The fact is, despite the murderous mayhem raging across the border in Mexico, the U.S. side, from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, is one of the nation's safest corridors.

According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities (with populations of at least 500,000) with the lowest violent crime rates — San Diego, Phoenix and the Texas cities of El Paso and Austin — are all in border states. "The border is safer now than it's ever been," U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona's Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that "we're not seeing the that's going on on the other side."

Consider Arizona itself — whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it plunged 23%. In the metro area of its largest city, Phoenix, violent crime — encompassing murder, rape, assault and robbery — fell by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years.

It is true that Phoenix has in recent years seen a spate of kidnappings. But in almost every case they've involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns, and the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008. Either way, the figure hardly makes Phoenix, as Arizona Senator John McCain claimed last month, "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City. A number of Latin American capitals can claim that dubious distinction.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2007474,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

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Facts be damned! Crime down, border crossings down, deportations up, illegal employer sanctions up. Don't let that get in the way of your "Secure the borders! The federal government isn't doing anything!" mantra repubs!

[Kali]

1. no wonder I am afraid to travel away (north) from the border area

kicking, recommending and bookmarking! (oh, and I'm one of Larry's constituents - I think he is doing a reasonable balancing act between his common sense and the ruckess all the racists have stirred up - he knows this whole thing is such BS, but there are a lot of people sitting around afraid - plus there was the murder that sure as hell made national news)
he is one of the very few repukes I have ever voted for.

[pinboy3niner]

2. 'Secure the border first' is a meme to preserve the status quo

Conservatives use it to block comprehensive reform--can't even consider that until we secure the border (which is an unattainable goal. We could put 100,000 troops on the border, and it would not be 'secure').

So big business continues to benefit from having a supply of cheap, hard-working, exploitable labor.

As an added plus, the GOP power strucure in a state like Arizona can use exaggerated claims about border violence (and Brewer's 'decapitated bodies' in the desert) to inflame bigotry and the scapegoating of undocumented Hispanic immigrants. They can pass laws ostensibly targeted at 'illegal' immigrants which have the effect of intimidating Hispanics who are legal residents and American citizens and suppressing the Hispanic (and mostly Democratic) vote.

AND, the GOP gets to slam dems in power with the false claim that they're "doing nothing" about border security and protecting Americans against crime, drug cartels and terrorists.

For the GOP it's been a win-win-win strategy.

[LAGC]

3. If anything, I'd imagine "illegal immigrants" are more law-abiding on average.

They have to be, otherwise they won't just be arrested for whatever crime they committed, they'll likely be deported as well, even for minor infractions, as Sheriff Joe is proving right now.

[Igel]

5. Yet imagination doesn't serve as evidence.

It's like the reports of services used by illegal immigrants. Those finding the lowest rate of service usually make an assumption along the order of "if a user isn't shown to be in the US illegally then s/he's assumed to be here legally." Of course, if a hospital makes it a practice not to check residency status, they'll show very few illegal immigrants using their services.

Same here. The rate of illegal immigrants is those of arrests in which the person's status is checked and their present here determined to be in violation of immigration and border control laws. If you have solved 10% of the crimes and only 1% of those are illegal immigrants, you can say that only 0.1% of the crimes are committed by the un- or mis-documented. You don't know squat about the other 90% of the crimes. I can easily imagine that transients are less likely to be caught than people who reside in an area. The transients in a border area are overwhelmingly likely to be illegal immigrants. So I can imagine that most of the crime at the border is done by illegal immigrants, few of which are caught. Arpaio, of course, focuses on settled areas.

Moreover, as immigration rates drop I can imagine that the best of the coyotes continue to smuggle their flesh, and fewer freelancers would be hoofing it on their own. So I can imagine that the illegal immigrants who are transported across the border do so more efficiently with lower detention rates.

I can also imagine that as enforcement puts more agents in areas with greater populations that illegal immigration would shift to more remote areas, so the crime rate would show a decrease at the border--fewer targets for crime, and if crimes are committed they'll be farther away from border patrol posts and less likely to be solved.

On the other hand, I can also imagine that the 2008 numbers don't show much about the current state of affairs at the border. Things change.

As I keep telling my mother, currently thinking that Houston to Phoenix is a 2 hour drive, that I'm in jail, that her two sons have kids but she has no grandkids, that her husband was taken away by the coroner's folk after he committed suicide in the garage (he had previously committed suicide in the yard "the first time", but got better), and that she commuted by air from Arizona to her blue-collar job in Maryland 5 times a week from 1952 until her retirement in both 1985 and 1993, imagination's a great thing but it's not really a good substitute for reality.

As for the border problems or lack of thereof, nobody's really interested in reality except to the extent it confirms what they've already imagined or believe.

[nyy1998]

4. I know here in El Paso, we were rated as the 2nd safest large city

So I know Jan Brewer has to be full of crap when she talks about illegal immigration.

[EFerrari]

6. Book mark this for the next time a wingnut tells you Obama

hasn't secured the border.

[TommyO]

7. What's this? A Republican governor caught in a lie?

I've never heard of something so preposterous!

And yes, that's :sarcasm: