Reason Foundation

Recent Research and Commentary

Strangers in a Strange Land

Forget man's inhumanity to man. District 9 is a deft satire of man's inhumanity to alien

August 14, 2009

Peter Suderman

Human history is a story of minorities versus oppressors: us against them, one family quarreling with the neighbors next door, one tribe pitted against another. District 9, the first film from South African commercial director Neill Blomkamp, takes this familiar story and extrapolates and exaggerates it into a simple science fiction question. If humanity can't manage peace and equality amongst its own, how would humans fare when faced with the truly foreign? Forget man's inhumanity to man: Blomkamp's debut, part energetic sci-fi romp, part apartheid parable, is a deft satire of man's inhumanity to alien.

America's Real Immigration Problem

August 4, 2009, 10:10pm

Shikha Dalmia

Nativist International

Bribing immigrants to leave

August 3, 2009

Jeff Winkler

Do Immigrants Make Cities Safer? The El Paso Miracle

How can a comparatively poor, high-immigration town that sits across the border from super-violent Ciudad Juarez be one of the safest big cities in America?

July 14, 2009

Radley Balko

By conventional wisdom, El Paso, Texas should be one of the scariest cities in America. In 2007, the city's poverty rate was a shade over 27 percent, more than twice the national average. Median household income was $35,600, well below the national average of $48,000. El Paso is three-quarters Hispanic, and more than a quarter of its residents are foreign-born. Given that it's nearly impossible for low-skilled immigrants to work in the United States legitimately, it's safe to say that a significant percentage of El Paso's foreign-born population is living here illegally.

El Paso also has some of the laxer gun control policies of any non-Texan big city in the country, mostly due to gun-friendly state law. And famously, El Paso sits just over the Rio Grande from one of the most violent cities in the western hemisphere, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, home to a staggering 2,500 homicides in the last 18 months alone. A city of illegal immigrants with easy access to guns, just across the river from a metropolis ripped apart by brutal drug war violence. Should be a bloodbath, right?

Here's the surprise: There were just 18 murders in El Paso last year, in a city of 736,000 people. To compare, Baltimore, with 637,000 residents, had 234 killings. In fact, since the beginning of 2008, there were nearly as many El Pasoans murdered while visiting Juarez (20) than there were murdered in their home town (23).

El Paso is among the safest big cities in America.

I.T. Go Home

Skilled immigrant exodus

May 29, 2009

Brian Doherty

Solving the Immigration Problem—Once and For All

The true story of the Save the Endangered Americans Act of 2018

May 14, 2009

Ross Levatter

When presented with the stark numerical evidence—to say nothing of President Obama's eloquence on the subject—Congress overwhelmingly passed the Save the Endangered Americans Act of 2018, which defined Americans as those people whose grandparents were born in the United States. The rest were illegal immigrants; the law allowed no retroactive immunity. "No one should be grandfathered in, so to speak," said our first Madam President. She was certainly sad to see her husband, the former president, deported, since two of his grandparents were born in Kenya. "But we all have to sacrifice to improve America," she declared. Fox News hailed the move, running hour-long specials on the worsening immigration crisis. Illegals, the pundits ominously declared, now numbered over 200 million. And like the Communists in the 1950s, they had infiltrated every aspect of the government. Bill O'Reilly denounced those who were destroying America from his remote feed in Ireland, since he, too, was forced to leave the United States. Things ran smoothly after that. In an interview several years after leaving office, Michelle Obama explained that once the definition of an illegal immigrant was clearly defined, it became quite easy to solve America's economic problems.

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