There is further reason to question the impression left by prison statistics that Hispanic offenders are heavily involved with drugs. The research literature indicates that Hispanics compared with other Americans have lower rates of crack cocaine smoking (Wagner-Echeagary et al., 1994) and of drug-related deaths (Hayes-Bautista et al., 1994). These findings are part of a larger pattern indicating that recently arrived Hispanic immigrants are healthier on a variety of measures than other Americans, and that over time these differences diminish, with Hispanic Americans becoming more like other Americans in their health problems (Scribner, 1996).

Nonetheless, the perception remains that immigrants are a significant cause of American crime problems. The 1994 U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform set out to assess perceived and actual links between immigration policy and crime in El Paso. The Commission found that the El Paso crime rate was perceived as escalating dramatically in recent years in spite of efforts of local law enforcement agencies. This escalating crime problem was seen as resulting from El Paso's rapid urban growth, which in turn was fed by migration from Mexico, including a large illegal population. The Commission reported that "… many people believe that undocumented aliens are the source of the increase in serious crime in El Paso and that the increasing number of undocumented aliens is due to the U.S. Government's inability to control the border" (1994:18).

The Commission sought to assess the basis of these perceptions in several ways, including a comparison of El Paso with other cities of similar size and a regression analysis focusing on the effects of proximity to the Mexican border on crime rates in El Paso and elsewhere. The initial comparison with similarly sized cities was revealing. El Paso's total 1992 crime rate ranked 30th among 40 U.S. cities of comparable size. El Paso ranked above the mean for the 40 cities only on larceny-theft, for which it ranked 13th and was within 10 percent of the mean for all cities. This concentration in minor forms of property crime is consistent with the El Paso and San Diego study cited above (Pennell et al. 1989), which finds that about two-thirds of the illegal immigrants in each of these cities were arrested for property crimes, with only 9 to 15 percent arrested for drug crimes. Meanwhile, the 1994 Commission report indicates that the El Paso murder rate was little more than one-third of that for all the cities and was 12 percent lower than the national average. The murder rate for El Paso is also comparable to its border city Juarez. So in spite of its much higher rate of poverty, Juarez too has a relatively low homicide rate as least as compared with U.S. cities. Although, like other cities, El Paso saw increases in violent crime in the 1980s, it still remains at the lower end of the spectrum for cities of comparable size.

As a further means of assessing the possible effects of Hispanic immigration on crime, the Commission also reported the results of regression analyses on violent and property crime for 244 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States. In addition to including conventional measures of urban and economic conditions in these MSAs, the regression equations also included vari-