By Mike Males
The eruption of anti-immigrant fury over the US government’s plans to temporarily relocate undocumented Latino children to shelters and Border Patrol facilities in Murietta, California, and other cities, is largely founded on the expressed belief that immigrants bring drugs and crime, threatening the safety of communities.
Yet as figures from the Murietta Police Department show, Latinos commit fewer crimes, especially drug offences, compared to whites in their respective proportions of the city’s population. Racially diverse areas with rapidly growing, younger immigrant populations are also becoming dramatically safer from gun violence, according to surprising new figures from the Centres for Disease Control.
While the United States still confronts serious gun violence, its parameters have changed dramatically. Twenty years ago, young Latino men were among those most at risk of dying from gunfire; today, older white men are more endangered. These trends are illustrated most strikingly in the three most populous states — California, Texas, and New York – where firearms deaths are declining two to three times faster than elsewhere in the country. Developments in these very different states challenge conventional debate on immigration policy and guns.
What’s behind the big-state decline? In all three, a clear pattern emerges: rapidly growing, younger Hispanic and Asian populations were associated with bigger drops in — and lower rates of — gun fatalities, particularly in cities. The large decline in gun killings among young people of all races and the recent increase among older whites strengthens a Violence Policy Centre analysis of surveys noting that “the aging of the current gun-owning population — primarily white males — and a lack of interest in guns by youth.” Maybe the newer, more diverse America has had enough.
Nearly all of New York’s decline in gun violence occurred in racially diverse New York City (gun-death rates down 81 percent), compared to only a modest decline in the rest of the state, which is older and whiter. Despite its Wild West image, Texas’ big gun problem today is not drug-running immigrants, home-invading thugs or vigilantes incited by pro-gun laws. Increasingly, it’s middle-aged white men shooting themselves. The larger political question is: If the nation’s three biggest states all experienced large drops in gun fatalities under radically different gun policies, do gun control laws and gun rights matter?
In addition, even after major improvements, gun violence remains widespread in areas of concentrated poverty. In impoverished Richmond, California (population 110,000), scores of teenaged youths have died in gun homicides since 1995. Even in Chicago, gun violence has dropped sharply in recent decades, particularly among young people. It is now at the lowest level in at least 40 years. But, as in most large cities, its most impoverished neighbourhoods suffer continued outbreaks of shootings. Where not subjected to crushing poverty, the new emerging America of more diverse, younger, immigrant and urban populations appears far less fearful, intolerant and enamoured with guns. The traditionalists dominating gun and immigrant policy debates should put aside their politics of anger and learn from them.
REUTERS
