Opinion: Miami’s falling murder rates show the fallacy of Republicans’ anti-immigration stance
Reading the news about the dramatic drop of homicides in Miami, a city of refugees, one must wonder about the sanity of the latest push by congressional Republicans to crack down on asylum seekers and their party’s overall anti-immigration stance.
A bill sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, would have U.S. officials automatically ban or detain asylum seekers while their claims are being considered. While a few Republican legislators oppose it, the bill has dozens of Republican co-sponsors, many who echo former President Trump’s dubious claims that undocumented immigrants are driving up crime rates in America.
But Miami’s latest homicide figures show that this city, where nearly 55% of the people are foreign-born and many of them are undocumented immigrants, is experiencing steadily declining murder rates.
As the Miami Herald’s Charles Rabin reported on March 3, the first two months of this year recorded a historic low of only four homicides in Miami.
Over the past two years combined, there were only 97 homicides in Miami. That was the city’s lowest homicide rate in almost six decades, despite the fact that its population has grown over that period, and that it has recently received an influx of undocumented migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti.
Anti-immigration zealots point out that Miami is an exception, because the city has benefited from the arrival of welleducated and often wealthy exiles from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and, more recently from Colombia, Brazil and Argentina.
But, contrary to the anti-immigrant propaganda of right-wing media that cherry-pick incidents of violence involving immigrants, homicides rates have been falling in the United States.
The murder rate fell by 7% in the 45 most populated U.S. cities last year. Miami showed a bigger decline than several other cities of similar size, such as Atlanta.
Interestingly, on the same day that the Miami Herald reported the decline in Miami’s murder rates, University of Miami professor Alejandro Portes and University of Pittsburgh professor Ariel C. Armony presented their book “Emerging Global Cities,” where Miami is placed alongside Singapore and Dubai as the world’s newest urban success stories.
“Despite their very different origins and history, Dubai, Miami and Singapore are remarkably similar,” the book’s authors say.
The three cities boast enormous ports, airports and banks that serve as centers for international trade and tourism, a thriving luxury real-estate industry and world-class art festivals such as our annual Art Basel. In addition, these cities are growing innovation centers, with big technological ambitions.
And the three “emerging global cities” all have benefited from capital flight from unstable or totalitarian countries in their regions. As I wrote in a 2021 column, Miami should build statues to
Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro and other Latin American dictators, who scared away investors and pushed their countries’ business people to deposit their savings abroad.
Immigration and ethnic diversity were key factors in the development of all three cities, the authors say. Portes and Armony’s book has a fascinating statistical table showing Miami’s ethnic composition since it sprung from a sleepy Southern town to the skyscraper-lined city it is today.
In 1970, the MiamiDade
County area was 27% Hispanic, 15% Black, and 66% white. Today, it is 69% Hispanic, 20% black, and 12% white, the book says, citing MiamiDade County records.
“The emergence of Miami, Dubai and Singapore was absolutely tied to the immigration phenomenon,” Armony told me. “Without immigration, none of these cities would be what they are today.”
The three cities thrived thanks to both the arrival of wealthy economic exiles,and low-skilled construction and tourism industry workers that made their growth possible, Armony said. Rather than focusing exclusively on cracking down on immigrants, America needs a comprehensive immigration reform to regulate who can enter the country and how, he added.
Miami’s success story does not necessarily mean that immigration-majority U.S. cities do better than others. But it shows that it’s not true that migrants — both legal and undocumented — have a negative economic impact, or that they drive up homicide rates.
Miami is a living example that immigration often helps transform cities for the better.
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‘‘ WHEN YOU HAVE A GROUP OF RATIONAL PEOPLE LOOKING AT THE SAME PROBLEM, IT’S NOT UNUSUAL FOR THEM TO COALESCE AROUND SIMILAR SOLUTIONS.