There are many ppl in the US who would feel safer with a border wall. In the last 4 years, rates of violence in Mexico have reached historic levels; a major argument for the wall is that it would keep the US safe.

That argument misunderstands the basic nature of violence. 1/11

Last fall, I traveled to Tijuana to try to understand how that city had become the "murder capital" of the Western Hemisphere, at the same time that San Diego—right across the border—has remained the safest big city in the United States. 2/11

The gulf in violence between the two similarly sized cities is immense: In 2018, Tijuana suffered from over 2,500 murders. That same year, San Diego recorded just 86 killings—more than 95 percent lower than the homicide rate in Tijuana. 3/11

As rates of violence increase in Mexico’s border towns, some have been surprised that there’s been essentially no "spillover violence" in US cities. Could this be the effect of a militarized border? In bw SD and Tijuana, a 14-mile steel barrier carves through the landscape. 4/11

But the barrier is not what stops Tijuana's murder epidemic from reaching San Diego. There’s a simple fact that the wall obscures: The ppl in Tijuana are not the true source of the violence in that city. And keeping certain ppl out is not actually what keeps San Diego safe. 5/11

Understand: The difference in violence is not explained by "bad hombres" being kept on one side of the border. Rather, rates of violence are created by *discrete sociological conditions* that exist strongly in Tijuana, but simply do not affect San Diego in the same way. 6/11

You might be thinking about poverty. And yes: In neighborhoods across Tijuana, I spoke to people who said the desperation of one's family starving can lead a person to commit crime. But that's not the full story here. 7/11

One of the largest factors that explains the violence in Tijuana is *impunity*: More than 9/10 murders go unsolved. Impunity has been a documented cofactor of violence in other cities like Chicago and LA: in Chicago, police solve only one out of every 20 shootings. 8/11

There's also the cyclical nature of violence: The #1 predictor of whether or not a person will go on to commit violence is whether they have experienced violence in the past. With decades of drug-fueled violence in TJ, the city is dealing with multi-generational traumas. 9/11

The bottom line is: The reasons violence looks so different between San Diego and Tijuana are the same reasons why, in LA, the rates of violence are so different between Compton and Beverly Hills. It's not about "The Wall," or barriers. It's about structural inequity. 10/11

Read more in my latest feature in The Nation, which is up online now, and will be in the print edition this week: 11/11 https://www.thenation.com/article/society/violence-epidemic-public-health/