Greg Weeks tips me to this article in The American Conservative. Unlike much of the hysteria from the right, his comments are sensible, fact-based with extensive documentation and worth a read. As Greg notes, here's the major takeaway from the article:
The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.
This part resonated with me:
Prior to moving back to my native California, I lived for five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most heavily immigrant and ethnically diverse parts of New York City. There as well, white Europeans were a small minority and immigrants from various Latin American countries were the largest ethnic group, close to an absolute majority of the local population. On a typical afternoon or evening, probably 80 percent of the people walking the streets of my neighborhood were non-white, and on dozens of occasions I returned home from Manhattan on a late-night train, the only white face in the subway car. Yet in all my years of living there, I never encountered a hostile or menacing situation, let alone suffered an actual criminal attack. Hardly what one would expect from television images, let alone the wild claims made by conservative magazines or talk radio.
I have lived in Jackson Heights for nearly nine years and in my experience it is the safest place in which I have lived in New York. I urge you to read the article. While there are probably many things I wouldn't agree with Unz about, I do respect the care and intelligence with which he wrote the article.
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