Eyal Press@The NewYorker (9/2/16): “Again and again in his Presidential campaign, Trump has issued sweeping assertions about how immigrants are ‘bringing crime’ to America. … Examining these claims is instructive, not for what they tell us about Trump but for what they reveal about immigrants, whose relationship to crime is greatly misunderstood. If you live in a city that has become less dangerous in recent decades, a growing body of evidence suggests that you actually have immigrants to thank. When Trump kicked off his campaign, last year, he accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and criminals to America. This was a patently outrageous claim, and there was no evidence behind it. According to [Harvard sociologist] Robert Sampson … communities with high concentrations of immigrants do not suffer from outsized levels of violence. The opposite is the case. … A 2014 study examining a hundred and fifty-seven metropolitan areas in the United States found that violent crime tended to decrease when the population of foreign-born residents rose. … For more than a year, Trump has used the spotlight on him to smear and malign tens of millions of people who have made the communities they inhabit safer places for people of all backgrounds to raise children or pursue their dreams. They’ll be gone, he says—he’s building a wall. Americans deserve to be reminded that these ideas aren’t just frightening in their intolerance. If your concern is public safety, they’re backward.”
