You're not likely to get killed on the streets of El Paso. (Image by Frank Vincentz.)

The great Newmark’s Door pointed me in the direction of an intriguing 2009 article from Reason Magazine that runs contrary to the popular thought of the day regarding immigration. Illegal immigrants (and even legal ones) have been accused of bringing chaos, crime and disorder to the cities and towns where they settle. But what if they’re actually making us safer?

Radley Balko’s smart piece, “The El Paso Miracle,” uses the Texas border town, which has high immigration and poverty rates, to show how American cities with a large concentration of aliens tend to be some of the safest places in the country. This isn’t an argument for lax border security; it only takes a single terrorist traveling to Mexico and crossing into America to cause major destruction. But if the article’s results are accurate, it provides valuable context amidst all the anti-immigrant hyperbole and factually incorrect noise. An excerpt:

“El Paso is among the safest big cities in America. For the better part of the last decade, only Honolulu has had a lower violent crime rate (El Paso slipped to third last year, behind New York). Men’s Health magazine recently ranked El Paso the second ‘happiest’ city in America, right after Laredo, Texas—another border town, where the Hispanic population is approaching 95 percent.

So how has this city of poor immigrants become such an anomaly? Actually, it may not be an anomaly at all. Many criminologists say El Paso isn’t safe despite its high proportion of immigrants, it’s safe because of them.

‘If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population,’ says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. ‘If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you’re likely in one of the country’s safer cities. San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they’re some of the safest places in the country.'”