Monday mirthness – Gav calls it

DirkH,
We don’t have “rising crime through unlimited illegal immigration” in the US. We do according to a bunch of fear-n-hate sites, but not according to sober studies that actually accumulate and calculate the data. For example, everyone who has lived in NYC for at least four decades knows that crime is down. Dramatically.

Crime rates have dropped all over New York City since 1990 — but especially in neighborhoods that have high immigration.
To be fair, Kasinitz says, “it’s absolutely not something you can attribute to any one cause.” He points to a variety of potential factors, including changes in policing and the end of the crack epidemic.
“But I would say, among the things that are on the positive side of the ledger, has been this dramatic increase in immigration,” Kasinitz says. “The fact that you’ve got more people, that you don’t have empty storefronts, that it’s not deserted, sort of decreases the conditions that can create crime.”
And it’s not just happening in New York City. Across the country, cities with high rates of immigration, like Los Angeles, Houston and San Diego, also have much lower crime rates than they did 20 years ago.
Some social scientists say that’s not a coincidence. Robert Sampson of Harvard University argues that first-generation immigrants make their communities safer by working hard and raising families.
“You don’t migrate to the United States from countries around the world on a whim. It takes planning,” Sampson says. “And for the most part, it is driven by economic motivations. People want a better life. They’re seeking to get ahead. And those are the very factors that tend to be associated with lower crime.”
[…]
But Brewer’s critics say there’s simply no evidence that illegal immigrants are driving up crime rates. And even the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which opposes increased immigration, came to the same conclusion.
“There’s no evidence that immigrants — or even illegal immigrants — are necessarily any more or less likely to be committing crimes than the population at large, says Jessica Vaughan, the center’s director of policy studies [Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which opposes increased immigration]. “It’s just that they tend to be associated with certain types of crimes — drug trafficking, for example.”
There is evidence that immigrants are overrepresented in local prison systems in Arizona and elsewhere. But overall, violent crime is actually lower than you would expect along the U.S. border with Mexico, says Ramiro Martinez, who teaches criminology at Northeastern University. [From NPR]