Immigrants Reduce Crime, Not Increase It

The current president ran his 2024 campaign in large part on the premise that immigrants pose a threat to Americans’ safety, and to the extent that he provided any support for his argument, he did so with lurid, distorted, cherry-picked anecdotes as if they represented typical behavior.

“There is effectively no relationship between immigration and crime,” according to Professor Charis Kubrin, who recently won the Stockholm Award, criminology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. She has collaborated with College of William and Mary’s Graham Ousay to study the relationship between immigration and crime in America and found “it’s a null relationship. When there is a significant relationship, it’s negative,” she said. “More immigration equals less crime.”

The theory Republicans advance is, in a nutshell, that crossing the border without authorization is an illegal act, and people who commit one illegal act will commit another, maybe because of ties they have to criminal enterprises. That theory makes a number of unsupported assumptions and ignores the lived experiences that contextualize immigrants’ lives.

Kubrin’s assessment is more logically based on the lives of immigrants, which grounds her assessments more solidly. Many fled dangerous, repressive, exploitative circumstances in Central America in hope of better lives for their families in the U.S. She explains the discovery that immigrants are far less likely to commit crime than those who are native-born, saying, “Immigrants themselves are not a random cross-section of people; they’re a self-selected group. … Most are coming here to improve their life chances, usually by getting higher-paying work. That suggests they’re goal-oriented, and that’s not a trait associated with a propensity for criminal behavior. There’s also another argument that there are protective effects of living in immigrant enclaves. There are strong ties among residents, extensive social networks, informal social control.”

The numbers speak clearly and consistently. A National Institute of Justice paper titled “Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate” studied crime rates of undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and U.S.-born citizens between 2012 and 2018. It used Texas arrest records that included the offender’s immigration status, and the results were consistent.

U.S.-born citizens were more than twice as likely as undocumented immigrants to commit criminal acts including violent crimes. A similar study of incarceration rates conducted by The Cato Institute came to the same conclusion, with an incarceration rate of 1,221 per 100,000, which was almost double the rate for documented immigrants (613 per 100,000) and nearly four times higher than undocumented immigrants (319 per 100,000).

The challenge, Kubrin admits, is how to change public perception. According to a Monmouth University poll, one in three American believe that migrants are more likely to commit violent crime like rape or murder, which makes sense considering the steady diet of horror stories and divisive rhetoric by Republicans and the media outlets that share their talking points uncritically.

The way the question is asked can changed the numbers, but “if you look at the history of immigration and immigration policy in this country–but also around the globe–there’s always been this assumption and perception around immigration as problematic in society,” Kubrin said in an interview. “And whether it’s immigrants bring crime, or immigrants cause the erosion of the foundations of our society, or immigrants are lazy, or they steal our jobs. There’s a lot of stereotypes–crime is just one of them.”

Add to that issues connected to race and racism, and the current administration’s war on expertise and science, and you have a social climate that can be resistant to information that doesn’t fit some people’s preconceptions.