Empirical Studies on Migrants and Crime

Trump’s speech last week, accepting the RNC’s nomination, was riddled with assertions that the country’s “illegal immigration crisis” has “spread… crime.”

Empirical studies on migrants and crime tell a different story. The following paragraphs are adapted from section 1.2 of my new crimmigration casebook wherein I address the myth of noncitizen criminality:

***

Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies of the libertarian thinktank the CATO Institute, published a study in 2018 based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Nowrasteh found that “For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, illegal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 50 percent below that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 66 percent below that of native-born Americans.” See Criminal Immigrants in Texas: Illegal Immigrant Conviction and Arrest Rates for Homicide, Sex Crimes, Larceny, and Other Crimes (2018). https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/irpb-4-updated.pdf.

Sociologists Michael T. Light and Ty Miller published a broader, longitudinal study of immigration and crime in 2018. Light and Miller combined “newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population with multiple data sources to capture the criminal, socioeconomic, and demographic context of all 50 states and Washington, DC, from 1990 to 2014.” They found that “Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence.” See Michael T. Light & Ty Miller, Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime, 56 Criminology 370 (2018), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30464356/.

Criminologists Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey published a book on noncitizen criminality in 2023 titled Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock. Looking at numerous studies, they found either no connection between immigration and crime or a “negative association” between immigrants and crime. In other words, they found that more immigration corresponds with less crime. As the authors told CNN, crimes committed by noncitizens that become “high profile incidents” and the focus of media and politicians are “not the norm. They’re the outlier.” 

Finally, Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky took a different approach to examining noncitizen criminality in his 2023 study with co-authors Leah Platt Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres. They looked at incarceration data from 1870 to 2020 and found that “immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years.” They also found that immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than US-born individuals. See Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1870-2020 (2023), https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/law-abiding-immigrants-incarceration-gap-between-immigrants-us-born.

***

Just a few cites to bring to the table for when you’re next debating the issue of noncitizen criminality.

-KitJ