Refugees Make Cities Safer

To examine this issue, we used refugee resettlement data from the U.S. Department of State’s Worldwide Refugee Processing System to calculate the 10 cities in the US that received the most refugees relative to the size of their population between 2006 and 2015. We then looked at what happened to both their overall crime rates over the same time period using detailed data available from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. This revealed a telling pattern: Rather than crime increasing, nine out of 10 of the communities actually became considerably more safe, both in terms of their levels of violent and property crime. This included places like Southfield, Michigan, a community just outside of Detroit, where violent crime dropped by 77.1 percent. Decatur, Georgia, a community outside Atlanta, experienced a 62.2 percent decline in violent crime.

As the table indicates, there is one city, West Springfield, Massachusetts, that saw an increase in crime between 2006 and 2015. That city and the surrounding area, however, was also impacted by another trend that swept across many parts of America during that time period—a ravaging opioid epidemic.

This study shows that cities where large numbers of refugees were resettled on average see a reduction in violent crimes. In some cases the change is quite dramatic, like in Michigan and Georgia where violent crime dropped by 77 and 62 percent.

So, you really can’t use that excuse any more.

Source

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Muslim Ban

Based on this list it seems more realistic to ban armed toddlers than Muslim immigrants but when it comes to fear and bigotry, facts don’t actually matter.

If you somehow missed it,  POTUS signed an executive order on Friday night banning people from 7 Middle Eastern countries from entering the United States. This may appear vaguely reasonable (or at least not absurd and outrageous) if it weren’t for the following fact

Between 1975 and 2015, foreign nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen killed exactly zero Americans on U.S. soil, according to an analysis of terror attacks by the Cato Institute.   [X]

[CHARLES KURZMAN]

So, one major issue, this seems like an extreme overreach for a nonexistent problem.

Worse though, is the fact that POTUS excluded from the ban, Middle Eastern countries where he has business ties.

Red -> Banned countries, Yellow -> Countries where POTUS has business ties [X]

Additionally, this ban affects legal residence who have been living in the US for years. It cancels green cards and visas from those countries. To get either of those you have to go through a strict vetting process.

This ban is also inhumane and cruel because it indefinitely blocks the entrance of Syrian refugees.

Not only are these Syrian refugees not terrorists, but they are fleeing the brutal state terrorism of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the brutal non-state terrorism of ISIS. [X]

They are VICTIMS.

Victims who are tirelessly vetted before resettling.

Anne Richard, a senior US State Department official, testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in November 2015 that any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States is scrutinized by officials from the National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and Pentagon.

They must also give up their biometric data — scans of their retinas, for instance — submit their detailed biographic histories and submit to lengthy interviews. These refugees are also queried against a number of government databases to see if they might pose a threat — and the whole process takes two years, sometimes more.

Leon Rodriguez, the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, who also testified at the November 2015 hearing, said that of all the tens of millions of people who are trying to get into the United States every year, “Refugees get the most scrutiny and Syrian refugees get the most scrutiny of all.”

By contrast, Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe do not go through anything like the rigorous process experienced by those who are coming to the States, and the volume of Syrians fleeing to Europe is orders of magnitude larger than it is to the United States. [X]