Trump and the myth of immigrant crime

The outrages cited by Trump are outside the norm, to say the least. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, pointed out last year, “The murder rate is actually higher in Washington, D.C., where I work, than in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, or other cities on the border like McAllen.”

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In 2011, El Paso, Texas, had the lowest crime rate ranking of any city with 500,000 or more residents. That is despite being just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico — which in 2011 had the second highest murder rate of any city on Earth.

The same pattern shows up away from the border as well. In his extensive research on Chicago — a city Trump cited for its violent crime — Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has found “a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans compared to blacks and whites.”

Here, he says, “increases in immigration and language diversity over the decade of the 1990s predicted decreases in neighborhood homicide rates in the late ’90s and up to 2006.”

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