Immigration Makes Us Safer, Richer and Better Able to Breathe: UCI Study

Well here's a timely UC Irvine study in light of today's Weekly cover package:

The Southern California Regional Progress Report to be released next week shows the large influx of Asian and Latino immigrants into Southern California in
the past 50 years has led to less crime, lower joblessness and
more stable property values.

It's like the Bizarro World view of Arizona's SB 1070 framers and the California Coalition for Immigration Reform!
]

Today's Weekly “Freedom Under Fire” special report consists of:

• “Bordering On Revolution”:
A hostile Supreme Court. A feckless Obama administration. America's war
on Mexicans has gone too far, says Village Voice Media executive editor
Michael Lacey.

• “Arizona Senate Bill 1070's Days of Rage”:
The U.S. Supreme Court and President Barack Obama leave the
undocumented and their allies no choice but to escalate civil
disobedience. Stephen Lemons reports.

• “Mexican Food Defeated America. Now, Mexicans in America Will Defeat SB 1070”: A cycle of justice that must be remembered, according to Gustavo Arellano.

• “Welcome Back, Jim Crow”: New laws in dozens of states could take out Barack Obama this fall. By Chuck Strouse.

• “Crossing the Line” Village Voice Media sister sites provide provocative immigration imagery.

Five
faculty members, 10 graduate students and six undergraduates in UCI's
School of Social Ecology crunched data covering five counties–Orange, Riverside, Ventura, Los Angeles and San Bernardino–from more than a dozen sources, including the FBI, U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development.

The early release come courtesy not of the university but the Orange County Register, whose online news report resembles a research paper. Among the findings sure to produce reactions of “I told you so” or “You're going to believe that liberal institution of higher PC learning and its flaming Pravda butt trumpet”:

• The growing immigrant population in Southern California
  communities has contributed to increases in property values.

• Ditto for crime rates dropping.

• And air quality improving over the past three decades.

• Neighborhoods with 10 percent more Latinos than surrounding areas at
  the beginning of the 2000s experienced a 1.3 percent greater increase
  in home values over the decade.

• Ethnically mixed SoCal neighborhoods today are more likely to have higher property values than homogenous
  neighborhoods, reversing a trend from earlier decades.

.
And so on. It's as if they took the Barbara Coe Playbook and wrote the complete opposite. Buy a study for all your amigos, amigo! 

The university says the study is aimed at sparking “evidence-based” discussion and future planning. It should certainly achieve the former.

Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!