[Serafin "Pedro" Alvarez ] Negrete, the victim in the Prince William case, arrived from Mexico in 2005, moving into a room in a faded trailer park and sending money back to his wife and three children. He was walking to that room, a simple space furnished with little more than a bed with no sheets, in September 2006 when he was confronted by the teenage robbers.At the entrance to the trailer park, Negrete was shot at least eight times. A weathered shrine marks the spot where his body fell. Fastened to a chain-link fence is a wooden cross covered with white lilies, plastic and permanent.
Georgino Napier, who was 18 at the time, and Carlito McToy, who was 17, were charged as adults with first-degree murder. They have pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 28 and 33 years in prison, respectively.
Much in the neighborhood has changed since the slaying. Overhead lighting was installed, police began to patrol the area more aggressively and residents learned to change their habits. Relatives of Negrete have returned to Mexico.
When Negrete was killed, Prince William police had already noticed a spike in robberies of immigrants. The county's crime rate in 2006 was the lowest in five years, but robberies were up 40 percent. Of the 351 reported, 83 percent were street robberies, many of which involved Latino victims.
Let's repeat that last point: crime rates are DOWN OVERALL in Prince William county (note that immigrants are LESS likely to commit crimes than non-immigrants), but robbery is UP against Hispanic immigrants ("amigo shopping"). In other words, it's the exact opposite situation of what the most vocal and vehement illegal immigration opponents claim. In fact, a 2006 Harvard study found that "living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration is directly associated with lower violence" -- but not, apparently, AGAINST the immigrants themselves. So let's debate what to do about illegal immigration, but let's keep our facts straight when we do so.
I bet the Prince william police will never check the status of a white european illegal
"the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our gross state product of $17.7 billion. Undocumented immigrants produced $1.58 billion in state revenues, which exceeded the $1.16 billion in state services they received."
Once again, the anti-illegal-immigrant bashers don't know what they're talking about.
For example:
Lach's thesis -- that immigration acts as a brake on inflation -- is unusual in that it explores the effect immigrants have on the demand side of an economy, and not just as workers who lower the costs of child care, for example, by increasing the labor pool.Lach said in a new paper published in the Journal of Political Economy that immigrants tend to do what Bethesda drivers do not do often enough: They go the extra mile to the cheaper gas station. Lach found that new immigrants spend much more time comparison-shopping than natives -- perhaps because their economic circumstances force them to look for the best deals . . .
I hope more empirical work is done in this area.
Wow, sounds awful! *snark*