Illegal neighbors mean less crime?

When I lived in Houston, I used to wonder why all my friends talked about how dangerous their neighborhoods were, when I thought I lived in an oasis of civility. Living on a dead-end street (ending in a bayou), it seemed the only danger was that every once in a while an alligator might get stuck up the bayou, and you’d have to watch that the dogs didn’t end up as ali-snacks.

The Vietnamese liquor store at the main street got robbed one afternoon (the robbers making their getaway with butts full of buckshot) and I once got into a shouting match with a couple of idiots pissing in my front lawn after they’d blocked my driveway because they couldn’t find a parking space for the club up on the main corner… but that’s ’bout it.

Then, it finally dawned on me. I had neighbors who disappeared even when the mailman came by. The last person they wanted to run into was a uniformed agent of the Federal government. Or any other uniformed government agent. So… the rule was keep things quiet.

Stephen Chapman, in the Brownsville-Harlingen (TX) Valley Morning Star writes:

Towns that pass measures against illegal immigrants portray the laws as a way to combat crime. In reality, the belief that this group is prone to felonious habits is largely unfounded. Crime rates plummeted in the 1990s even as illegal immigration surged, and Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has documented that “living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration is directly associated with lower violence.”

The evidence is surprising but clear: Foreign-born Hispanics are far less likely to end up in prison than native-born whites. They also have low divorce rates.

As for learning English, the truth is also more appealing than the myth. Many of the people who have immigrated here don’t speak the language well, if at all. But that’s a transient phenomenon with a time-tested treatment: reproduction.

…

But some indicators provide ample cause for worry. Latino men born in this country are seven times more likely to end up in prison than those who came here from abroad. Unwed mothers account for nearly half of all Hispanic births. Raul Gonzalez, legislative director of the National Council of La Raza, sees the rise of “negative assimilation” — Latinos adopting the malignant attributes they see in other ethnic groups, rather than the productive ones.

I guess the secret is to learn enough Spanish to live with the folks from the “old country” but hope the Americanized second generation moves away.