Immigration

Guest: Ted Curry, Ph. D., Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at El Paso  This week, Congress voted to block the Obama Administration from defending the president’s executive action on immigration in court. President Obama’s order would protect some immigrants in the country illegally from being deported. That order has so angered Republicans that it is motivating much of their opposition to other Obama efforts on trade and international relations.  When the debate over immigration gets rolling, one of the main arguments pundits and politicians turn to is crime. Illegal immigration fuels crime, they say. It makes neighborhoods unsafe. But years of research culled from a variety of neighborhoods in El Paso, Texas paint a different picture.  Immigrant communities tend to be close-knit, which helps keep such neighborhoods low-crime, even if they may be poor. El Paso is one of the safest big cities in the country, and one of the reasons it may be, says Curry, is that it’s an “immigrant destination city.” “Immigrant neighborhoods have higher levels of poverty, but don’t have higher levels of crime.”