Cory Massimino

Immigration in The Independent

April 5, 2019 by Cory

I was published in The Independent on the realities of immigration to the United States. Despite the repeated claims of President Trump, the fact remains that immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans. Trump has recently threatened to close down the border with Mexico, maintaining his line that immigration across that border constitutes a “state of emergency” and a threat to the United States. From the article:

The idea that closed borders and more fencing will increase border security isn’t supported by the facts. In his State of the Union address, Trump made this argument when he credited the decline in El Paso’s violent crime rate to the local border wall. But El Paso’s violent crime rate had already fallen 34 per cent from 1993 to 2006 — the year George W Bush authorised the wall.

Meanwhile, welcoming immigration works.

In 2009, only a year after the local border wall began construction, journalist Radley Balko explained how El Paso — then the third safest city in the country and currently the seventh safest city— proves common stereotypes wrong. To immigration restrictionists, El Paso could look like a recipe for violence and anarchy: it has the seventh largest immigrant population of any American city. Its population is over 75 per cent Hispanic and over 25 per cent foreign-born and its poverty rate is twice the national average. Many residents are likely undocumented. Yet Balko found that “El Paso’s embrace of its immigrants might be a big reason why the low-income border town has remained one of the safest places in the country.”

Read the full piece here.

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