San Diego is America's safest city, but Republicans keep claiming that the US-Mexican border is responsible for "gangs, drugs, human trafficking and massive crime"

True. But Phoenix is about as far away from the Mexican border as Austin is.

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Locking up migrants for the misdemeanor of being undocumented and giving them a dollar a day to work is human trafficking.

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This drives me absolutely crazy about the anti-immigration rhetoric, because you either have overtly racist lies that immigrants are criminals or more nonsensically, pointing out specific immigrants who committed crimes here and saying that if they hadn’t been allowed in the country, those crimes wouldn’t have been committed. But that’s like pointing out the specific means of transportation a perpetrator used to get to the crime scene (“If only we didn’t have pickup trucks, this crime wouldn’t have been committed!”) or some other random, arbitrary quality a specific criminal had (“If only we didn’t have college educated people, this crime wouldn’t have been committed!”).
But the fact that native-born Americans are more likely to commit crimes means that if we’re going to divide “immigrants” and “Americans” into two groups and demonize one, it’s the “Americans” who are the “criminals.” So if we’re going to use the anti-immigrant logic but premise it on the real facts, surely that means we should be arguing that we desperately need more immigrants to come in and lower our crime rate.

Although given Fox news these days, probably with the George Soros bit.

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Maybe they are sending their best people after all…?

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There’s a clear historical analogy already. In the 1930s Nazi propaganda regularly published (often factual) accounts of Jewish people who committed various crimes, thus feeding the (entirely false) public perception that Jewish people were more likely to engage in criminal activity than non-Jewish people.

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That’s an interesting perspective - Tijuana is less than twice as murdery as Baltimore.

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Also applicable to the term “terrorist”. But hey, what do facts matter?

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Yeah, and when the Trump administration did their whole “immigrant crime” hotline thing, it was like they were daring people to compare them to Nazis.

I keep saying: we’ve got to shut down white men until we have this whole thing figured out.

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Except there is zero evidence that urban immigrants are any different. I have no time for evidence-free insistence or suggestions, period.

It’s similar to the “Black on Black” crime meme the GOP loves so much. OF COURSE Black folk are more often the victim of Black crime, just as Whites are more often the victim of Whites; most people who commit crimes, do so near where they live. It’s not rocket surgery.

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sounds like heaven to me. i’d be doing a lot more walking and biking.
i could eat tacos for 4 out of the 3 meals every day.

i don’t mind walking over to help out you only live 14 tacos away.

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50+ murders per 100k? No wonder German tourists are scared to visit the US. I wonder how America’s safest cities compare to Germany’s worst (anyone have statistics on Frankfurt?)

Germany as a whole has a rate of 1.18/100,000 homicides… https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-homicide-victims

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Seems to me that this supports the idea of a fortified border. The border is fortified near the cities. People who enter through these illegal crossings are checked to see if they are known criminals. Those who do have criminal backgrounds don’t bother with the legal crossings because they know they will be stopped.

All the most violent cities in the US are in the Midwest, and have been for decades as manufacturing jobs vacated the area. Not to mention that the rural US is more dangerous than cities in a flip in the statistics that happened earlier this year.

Reality has never once reflected the rhetoric of crime, justice, or race in the US.

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More evidence that the obsession with a wall on the US southern border is pure racism: The only three “border cities” on the Canadian border (Detroit, MI; Buffalo, NY; Bellingham, WA) all have higher crime rates than the listed cities on the Mexico border. Note: Houston would mess up that pattern, if you included it as a border city, which it is more of than Phoenix.

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“All” might be a bit much. Baltimore and Miami are not in the Midwest, last time I checked. :wink:

Pretty sure St Louis, Detroit, and Flint have been trading that #1 slot since the 90s.

EDIT

And as far as the top 10/25 lists half or more are dotted around the Midwest; Indianapolis, Lansing, Milwaukee, multiple Springfields, Rockford, Kansas City, Toledo, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago, etc.

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Also note that America’s crime rate has halved since it peaked in 1991.
Yet a lot of people are convinced crime is worse than ever before.

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Have you ever tried to do crime research outside of central cities? I have and it is a nightmare. Say what you will about the 100 or so largest cities, but they have largely figured out documentation in a way that can’t be counted on in smaller communities.

I couldn’t find Frankfurt, but Berlin comes in around 2.6/100,000 which would put it close to breaking into the top 10 safest major (population over 250,000) US cities.