Immigration and Crime: What does the research tell us?

​President Trump’s singular obsession with the construction of his promised border wall has reached a crescendo in recent months: it triggered the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history and more recently it is the subject of his unprecedented move to use a declaration of National Emergency to override Congress and provide $8 billion for a partisan political project.
 
Setting aside questions about whether border barriers are ever able—or even intended—to produce “security” for the nations they aim to “protect” (Brown 2010, Jones 2012, Alatout 2009), Trump has worked diligently to convince the country that immigration makes the United States less secure. Of course, this assertion is apparently not based on any consultation with data or based in reality. Trump’s strategy of turning his “alternative facts” into common sense truths is eerily similar to that used by George W. Bush’s administration to convince the public that there was a relationship between the 9/11 attacks and the country of Iraq. Both strategies, of course, tap into longstanding and widely-held stereotypes about a racialized other.
 
Luckily, there are a great number of knowledgeable people who have dedicated their careers to asking and answering the question of what the relationship is—if there is one—between immigration and crime. In what follows, I will do my best to concisely present the main conclusions that this large body of scholarly research has provided us. I wrote this short piece to join the chorus of voices combatting dangerous disinformation about immigration. It is my hope that this information might be used by neighbors, friends, teachers, students, and family members to engage in empirically-grounded discussions about a topic that has, unfortunately, mostly been discussed without concern for the empirical reality.
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So, what does the research tell us?

The general consensus among scholars is that immigration is not associated with increased crime. Not with crime in general, not with violent crime, not with property crime. Period.
 
In fact, some scholars even argue immigration might actually be associated with a reduction in crime (Lee and Martinez , Light and Miller 2018, Reid et al. 2005). That’s right—while not totally conclusive, there is some evidence that cities and neighborhoods with more immigrants might actually tend to have less crime.
 
The take-away: While we often hear politicians say that allowing immigrants—undocumented or documented—into the country puts us at risk, this is simply not based in reality. It is a fabrication. A myth. False.
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Give me the details, please!

I’ll summarize a few of the interesting conclusions reached by scholars who study this topic. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, but still representative of the general conclusions in the field more broadly.
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1. More immigrants does not lead to higher crime rates. Scholars of the immigration-crime nexus have long noted that, over time, rising immigration rates coincide with falling crime rates. It turns out that this is also true on the individual city level. In this interactive report, you can track the trajectory of crime rates and immigration population size between 1980 and 2016 in 200 different cities in the U.S (Flagg 2018). In the great majority of cities (70%) the immigration rate increased and the crime rates either remained stable or fell.
2. Cities with larger immigrant communities do not have more crime. A number of studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between the proportional size of city’s immigrant population and crime rates. Trump would have you believe that cities with higher percentages of immigrants also have more crime. It turns out this is just not true. For example, one study (Reid et al. 2005) looked at 150 randomly selected metro areas and used Census data to find the percent of foreign born residents living in those cities. Then they found the crime rates for violent and non-violent (property) crime for those cities. If Trump were right, cities with larger percentages of immigrants would also have higher crime rates—but this is not what they found. Instead, they found that there was no positive correlation between the percent of foreign born residents and crime in U.S. metro areas. In fact, their findings suggest that cities with larger recent immigrant communities might have slightly less homicide and theft. It’s important to note that these findings are true even when controlling for factors like population density, total population size, the unemployment rate, poverty rate, and many other factors. Additionally, there seems to be evidence that this is true on the neighborhood level as well. For example, see this report by leading urban scholar Robert Sampson on the relationship between immigrants and crime in Chicago neighborhoods (Sampson 2008).
3. Undocumented immigration is not associated with more crime. You might have heard someone say something like: “I welcome legal immigrants, but people who come illegally are dangerous criminals.” Well, now you can feel confident correcting this misinformation. It turns out that researchers have  found that, at the state level, there is not a relationship between the proportion of undocumented immigrants and violent crime of any kind (Light and Miller 2018).
4. “Sanctuary city” policies do not make cities more dangerous. Another common assertion by members and supporters of Trump’s administration is that the policies of “sanctuary cities” make their residents less safe. According to Trump, sanctuary cities are breeding grounds for crime and attract criminal immigrants. It turns out that this is simply not true. One study (O’Brien, Collingwood, and El-Khatib 2019) tested this idea in two ways: First, they asked whether there was a change in crime rates after cities adopted sanctuary city policies. They looked at trends in violent crimes, property crimes, and rape in these cities and found that cities saw no significant change in crime rates after adopting sanctuary city policies. Second, they did a test to see whether, on average, cities with and without sanctuary policies, but “matched” in other aspects, had different rates of violent and property crimes. They found that there was no statistical difference in either direction—being a sanctuary city led to neither an increase nor a decrease in crime.

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​Sarah // Madison, Wisconsin

Works cited

• Alatout, Samer. 2009. "Walls as Technologies of Government: The Double Construction of Geographies of Peace and Conflict in Israeli Politics, 2002—Present."  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (5):956-968.
• Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books.
• Flagg, Anna. 2018. The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant. The Marshall Project.
• Jones, Reece. 2012. Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. London: Zed Books.
• Lee, Matthew T., and Ramiro Martinez. "Immigration reduces crime: an emerging scholarly consensus." In Immigration, Crime and Justice, 3-16.
• Light, Michael T., and Ty Miller. 2018. "Does Undocumented Immigration Icrease Violent Crime?"  Criminology 56 (2):370-401. doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12175.
• O’Brien, Benjamin Gonzalez, Loren Collingwood, and Stephen Omar El-Khatib. 2019. "The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration."  Urban Affairs Review 55 (1):3-40. doi: 10.1177/1078087417704974.
• Reid, Lesley Williams, Harald E. Weiss, Robert M. Adelman, and Charles Jaret. 2005. "The immigration–crime relationship: Evidence across US metropolitan areas."  Social Science Research 34 (4):757-780. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.01.001.
• Sampson, Robert. 2008. "Rethinking Crime and Immigration."  Contexts.