Despite its centrality to public and political discourse, we lack even basic information on fundamental questions regarding undocumented immigrants and crime. This stems largely from data constraints. Going beyond existing research, we utilize data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which checks and records the immigration status of all arrestees throughout the state. Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years. Our findings help us understand why the most aggressive immigrant removal programs have not delivered on their crime reduction promises and are unlikely to do so in the future.
"Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Contentious Issue, opens new tab" by Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Graham Ousey, a sociology professor at William & Mary. The 2018 study was published in the peer-reviewed Annual Review of Criminology.
A meta-analysis of more than fifty studies on the link between immigration and crime between 1994 and 2014 found there was no significant relationship between the two.
The researchers subsequently studied all aspects of the issue in a book, opens new tab published last year that came to similar results.
The report, which used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety between 2012-2018, found a lower felony arrest rate for immigrants in the U.S. illegally compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens and no evidence of increasing criminality among immigrants.
Light published a study, opens new tab in 2017 that found illegal immigration does not increase violent crime. The study used data from all 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., from 1990-2014. A separate study found, opens new tab no link between increased illegal immigration and drunk-driving deaths.
The libertarian think tank has published multiple, opens new tabreports, opens new tab that show immigrants in the country commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born. In a recent USA Today op-ed, opens new tab, Nowrasteh previewed new research that found immigrants in the U.S. illegally in Texas were about 26% less likely to be convicted of homicide than native-born Americans from 2013-2022.