Fake border news

Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, illegal crossings have been on the decline for years.

The White House apparently can’t help but spew nonsense when it comes to Texas border cities.

The latest drivel comes courtesy of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who tweeted on Monday: “Ask El Paso, Texas (now one of America’s safest cities) across the border from Juarez, Mexico (one of the world’s most dangerous) if a wall works.” She linked to a dubious column in the New York Post, and the White House later posted the column on its website.

First, it’s nice of the Trump administration to acknowledge that El Paso is one of the nation’s safest cities. President Donald Trump and his enablers have a habit of portraying our nation’s border with Mexico as a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Why the sudden change? To support the president’s call for the erection of a wall along the Mexican border.

The column promoted by the White House was written by Paul Sperry and claims that border fencing completed in 2010 drove down crime and illegal border crossings in El Paso.

“Before 2010, federal data show the border city was mired in violent crime …” Sperry wrote in the column pushed by the White House.

That’s false. For years, FBI data has shown that El Paso’s violent crime rate is about half the rate for U.S. cities of similar size. The city’s crime rate has been in decline since the late 1980s, when El Paso police embraced community policing, relying on improved relationships with the city’s residents to deter crime.

It is true, as Sperry reports, that apprehensions of undocumented immigrants have generally been down in the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector — which includes the western edge of Texas and all of New Mexico — since 2010. He ignores that the decline is a continuation of a trend that dates to the 1980s. And apprehensions also have plummeted in Border Patrol sectors with little to no fencing.

Contrary to candidate Trump’s rhetoric in 2015 and 2016, illegal immigration has been on the decline for years. The reasons for the sharp drop include changes in the U.S. and Mexican economies, a decline in Mexican fertility rates and increased border security. To attribute the decline to border fencing alone is absurd.

Finally, the fencing in El Paso and other border areas bears no resemblance to Trump’s fantasy of a “big, beautiful wall” stretching from Brownsville to San Diego. Such a wall is wasteful and inefficient.

Instead of engaging in border paranoia, let’s celebrate the success of El Paso and other border cities in building safer communities. The rest of the country has much to learn from them.

The reasons for the sharp drop include changes in the U.S. and Mexican economies, a decline in Mexican fertility rates and increased border security.