Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas

Between 2012 and 2018, undocumented immigrants in Texas were less than half as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as U.S.-born  citizens, according to a University of Wisconsin–Madison study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Melinda Wenner Moyer notes in Scientific American that the study is one of the first to “link a specific immigration status to the rates for specific types of crimes.” Charis E. Kubrin, professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, describes the study as “another nail in the coffin of what we know about the link between immigration and crime.” Said, Michael Light, a sociologist who co-authored the study: “Simply put, we found that undocumented immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than both legal immigrants and, especially, native-born U.S. citizens.” 

Here is an abstract of the study:

We make use of uniquely comprehensive arrest data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to compare the criminality of undocumented immigrants to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens between 2012 and 2018. We find that undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period. The differences between US-born citizens and undocumented immigrants are robust to using alternative estimates of the broader undocumented population, alternate classifications of those counted as “undocumented” at arrest and substituting misdemeanors or convictions as measures of crime.

KJ