Is Crime on US Borders In Fact A Huge Problem? Judge Says 'No'

HopeTracker| In yesterday’s fragmented ruling on key provisions in Arizona’s new anti-immigration law, U.S.District Judge Susan Bolton also declared them unnecessary.

The facts of a current TIME magazine article leave us confused. The vision one has listening to TV pundits is that crime is out of control on US borders. According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities (with populations of at least 500,000) with the lowest violent crime rates — San Diego, Phoenix and the Texas cities of El Paso and Austin — are all in border states. “The border is safer now than it’s ever been,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona’s Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that “we’re not seeing the [violent crime] that’s going on on the other side.”

We don’t recall ever hearing these assertions challenged by any media interviewer, leaving us to ask: what are they there for? From our viewpoint, interviewers don’t ask anyone to prove the facts of their media statements, and this is a perfect example. We might as well have robots in the chair. via TIME