New at Reason: Radley Balko on How Immigration Made El Paso One of America's Safest Cities

July 6, 2009

By conventional wisdom, El Paso, Texas should be one of the scariest places in America. It's a city of illegal immigrants with easy access to guns, just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a metropolis currently ripped apart by brutal drug war violence. So El Paso should be a bloodbath, right?

Here's the surprise: El Paso is among the safest big cities in America. And as Senior Editor Radley Balko reports, many criminologists say El Paso isn't safe despite its high proportion of immigrants, it's safe because of them.

Read all about it here.