IMMIGRATION BENEFICIAL
An article from Newsweek by Christopher Dickey, debunks the current myth that with immigrantion makes our cities “unsafe.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/72735/output/print
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Urban Legends
New immigrants may be the best thing that ever happened to American cities, but don’t wait for the leading presidential candidates to tell you that.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 4:28 PM ET Nov 28, 2007
What do the safest big cities in the United States have in common? Rudy Giuliani knows, but he’s not likely to say so, at least not now. Why? Because the answer, in a word, is immigrants.
When Giuliani was the law-and-order mayor of New York City, Mr. Zero Tolerance was more than happy to tolerate immigrants, including those who entered or stayed in the United States illegally. As conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out recently, Giuliani “once went overboard and declared, ‘If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city.’”
This wasn’t so much altruism or “immoderate centrism,” as some of Giuliani’s fans suggest, or even a sentimental reaction to his own family’s (somewhat controversial) immigrant roots. It was purely practical. About 38 percent of New York City’s population was born outside the United States of America, and while most are in the country legally, many are not. (If they can’t register their identities anyplace with the city or state government, they can’t be counted accurately. And of course they can’t register with the feds without risking deportation.) What’s certain is that first-generation immigrants have played almost as important a role in making New York more secure as the vaunted hard line on crime taken by Mr. Zero T.
The “Safest City” awards published a few days ago by Congressional Quarterly back up this kind of thinking. Among the top 10 with populations over 500,000, four are in Texas: Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin and the border town of El Paso, which is the second-safest big city in the country. Two are in California: San Jose and San Diego, which, again, is right across the line from Mexico. The safest city of all is Honolulu, with its very diverse population, while New York City ranks fourth. (New York City also looks as if it will have fewer murders this year than at any time since reliable statistics became available, in 1963.) “I would say, if you want to be safe, move to an immigrant city,” Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard University, told me on the phone this afternoon.
Nationwide, over the last 15 years we’ve seen the largest wave of immigration, in absolute numbers, both legal and illegal, ever to reach the shores of the United States. Foreigners fresh off the boat, so to speak, now represent almost 13 percent of the U.S. population, which is almost as high in percentage terms as during the late 19th century. According to a report from the nonprofit Immigration Policy Center earlier this year, the estimated undocumented population has doubled, to 12 million, since 1994. Yet the violent crime rate nationwide has declined more than 34 percent during the same period, while crimes against property dropped more than 26 percent.
Yes, these facts do run against conventional wisdom, which holds that newly arrived foreigners are essentially, even intrinsically, dangerous. A recent study showed that 75 percent of Americans think “more immigrants cause higher crime rates.” Full stop. A single sensational incident involving illegal aliens, like the execution-style murder last summer of three students in Newark, N.J., can send shudders through people already nervous about all the newcomers. And that feeling is especially strong in less urbanized parts of the country like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, which are vital to presidential contenders. Certainly in South Carolina, where I spend part of each year, laborers from Mexico seem to be changing the whole tenor of daily life. And then, of course, there’s the question of terrorism, which, we all remember, flew in from abroad. Yet if ever there was an issue where popular thinking is misleading, it’s the dangers posed by new immigrants.
On the terror front, for instance, after Giuliani left office in 2002 his successor, Michael Bloomberg, and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly drew on the city’s incredible diversity to help create one of the most effective law enforcement and counterterror operations in the country. The NYPD has about 600 linguists: native speakers of Urdu, Dari, Bengali, Arabic (in several dialects), Russian, Gaelic, Spanish and more. The class that graduated from the police academy a year ago included almost 300 foreign-born cadets from more than 50 different countries who have a feel for the street in just about every imaginable immigrant neighborhood.
But it’s the overall social impact of immigration on crime that is most important. “Almost everyone who has examined this issue and is not an ideologue has come to the same conclusion,” says James Lynch, a distinguished professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in Manhattan. “In the United States immigrants engage in common law crime at rates lower than the native population.” And it’s not just that newly arrived immigrants are less likely to be part of an urban nightmare, it’s that they bring their own positive dreams. According to Sampson, there’s “a growing consensus” that “immigration revitalizes cities around the country.” Instead of becoming empty urban wastelands, marginal neighborhoods fill up with new immigrants who want to build their futures and wind up building the economy.
Hillary Clinton understands all this, of course. The immigration wave, including the flood of illegals, began when her husband Bill was president. But it shouldn’t be surprising that the Democratic senator from New York, as presidential candidate, sounded so confused when asked in a recent debate about an abortive plan by New York’s Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer to give driver’s licenses to otherwise undocumented foreigners. The questions were basically “are you for or against.” But of course the subtext is much more complicated. If first-generation immigrants are helping to make cities more secure, then doesn’t it make sense to have as much information about them as possible? Or is it smarter to make them live as far outside the law as possible? Clinton couldn’t seem to decide, perhaps because to make her point honestly she’d have to convince 75 percent of Americans their fundamental assumptions are wrong. People just know, or think they know, that immigration and crime are part of the same package.
So the debates go on, with every discussion of illegal aliens ever more alienated from the facts at hand.
‘Black On Black’ Crime Taken To Task
There is a really interesting discussion occuring in reference to the shooting death of Sean Taylor. Jason Whitlock of FOX Sports has written the following article…(be sure and check out the comments).
Taylor’s death a grim reminder for us all
Jason Whitlock / FOXSports.com
Posted: 4 hours ago
There’s a reason I call them the Black KKK. The pain, the fear and the destruction are all the same.
Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now. The life they knew has been destroyed, an 18-month-old baby lost her father, and, if you’re a black man living in America, you’ve been reminded once again that your life is in constant jeopardy of violent death.
The Black KKK claimed another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a checkered past this time.
No, we don’t know for certain the circumstances surrounding Taylor’s death. I could very well be proven wrong for engaging in this sort of aggressive speculation. But it’s no different than if you saw a fat man fall to the ground clutching his chest. You’d assume a heart attack, and you’d know, no matter the cause, the man needed to lose weight.
Well, when shots are fired and a black man hits the pavement, there’s every statistical reason to believe another black man pulled the trigger. That’s not some negative, unfair stereotype. It’s a reality we’ve been living with, tolerating and rationalizing for far too long.
When the traditional, white KKK lynched, terrorized and intimidated black folks at a slower rate than its modern-day dark-skinned replacement, at least we had the good sense to be outraged and in no mood to contemplate rationalizations or be fooled by distractions.
Our new millennium strategy is to pray the Black KKK goes away or ignores us. How’s that working?
About as well as the attempt to shift attention away from this uniquely African-American crisis by focusing on an “injustice” the white media allegedly perpetrated against Sean Taylor.
Within hours of his death, there was a story circulating that members of the black press were complaining that news outlets were disrespecting Taylor’s victimhood by reporting on his troubled past
No disrespect to Taylor, but he controlled the way he would be remembered by the way he lived. His immature, undisciplined behavior with his employer, his run-ins with law enforcement, which included allegedly threatening a man with a loaded gun, and the fact a vehicle he owned was once sprayed with bullets are all pertinent details when you’ve been murdered.
Marcellus Wiley, a former NFL player, made the radio circuit Wednesday, singing the tune that athletes are targets. That was his explanation for the murders of Taylor and Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams and the armed robberies of NBA players Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry.
Really?
Let’s cut through the bull(manure) and deal with reality. Black men are targets of black men. Period. Go check the coroner’s office and talk with a police detective. These bullets aren’t checking W-2s.
Rather than whine about white folks’ insensitivity or reserve a special place of sorrow for rich athletes, we’d be better served mustering the kind of outrage and courage it took in the 1950s and 1960s to stop the white KKK from hanging black men from trees.
But we don’t want to deal with ourselves. We take great joy in prescribing medicine to cure the hate in other people’s hearts. Meanwhile, our self-hatred, on full display for the world to see, remains untreated, undiagnosed and unrepentant.
Our self-hatred has been set to music and reinforced by a pervasive culture that promotes a crab-in-barrel mentality.
You’re damn straight I blame hip hop for playing a role in the genocide of American black men. When your leading causes of death and dysfunction are murder, ignorance and incarceration, there’s no reason to give a free pass to a culture that celebrates murder, ignorance and incarceration.
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Of course there are other catalysts, but until we recapture the minds of black youth, convince them that it’s not OK to “super man dat ho” and end any and every dispute by “cocking on your bitch,” nothing will change.
Does a Soulja Boy want an education?
HBO did a fascinating documentary on Little Rock Central High School, the Arkansas school that required the National Guard so that nine black kids could attend in the 1950s. Fifty years later, the school is one of the nation’s best in terms of funding and educational opportunities. It’s 60 percent black and located in a poor black community.
Watch the documentary and ask yourself why nine poor kids in the ’50s risked their lives to get a good education and a thousand poor black kids today ignore the opportunity that is served to them on a platter.
Blame drugs, blame Ronald Reagan, blame George Bush, blame it on the rain or whatever. There’s only one group of people who can change the rotten, anti-education, pro-violence culture our kids have adopted. We have to do it.
According to reports, Sean Taylor had difficulty breaking free from the unsavory characters he associated with during his youth.
The “keepin’ it real” mantra of hip hop is in direct defiance to evolution. There’s always someone ready to tell you you’re selling out if you move away from the immature and dangerous activities you used to do, you’re selling out if you speak proper English, embrace education, dress like a grown man, do anything mainstream.
The Black KKK is enforcing the same crippling standards as its parent organization. It wants to keep black men in their place — uneducated, outside the mainstream and six feet deep.
In all likelihood, the Black Klan and its mentality buried Sean Taylor, and any black man or boy reading this could be next.
Blogger Austin at Sundrip Journals takes Mr. Whitlock to task at…
Thoughts on this?
Who Am I?
Am I some wild-eyed liberal? Nope. I’m more of a moderate who, when I have to lean, usually leans left of center. Seeing what America has become under the reign of a lunatic without a conscience, a person who believes he has been “chosen” by God, and whose strings are pulled by power-hungry maniacs has made me realize just who and how dangerous the lunatic fringe really is.
It has become encumbent upon Americans, at this point, to refuse to capitulate to any further exploitation by these extremists and to stand up for what we know to be right.
