Immigrants Don’t Commit More Crime

“Trump wouldn’t need to crack down on these illegals if Biden didn’t leave the borders open!”

My cousin-by-not-blood (half-sibling’s cousin but we all treat each other like blood) was killed this weekend in a Minneapolis shooting. Details are still scant on what exactly happened, but if I were to guess, the killer was a U.S. Citizen.

More details to come, I guess. Rest in Peace, Niswe.

My plan today was to look at Biden’s open borders, but this now takes priority as my heart is hurting. The administration made a huge deal out of how crime is at an all-time low in Minneapolis since ICE showed up. Right?

Why, then, is my cousin not here?

In today’s post, I’ll look at the data of crime statistics between native-born and immigrant groups. I have always felt and heard that immigrants commit less crime, but is that really true?

Let’s get started.

Heartaches by the Numbers

Every violent crime is a heartache for someone. The song “Heartaches by the Numbers” plays in the back of my mind while I write this, just because of that line. Also, yes, I first heard it playing Fallout New Vegas.

When we read the news and see “person shot to death in Minneapolis”, we automatically assume the worst. Gang violence, drugs deals gone bad, etc, despite it not always being the case. Even when it is the case, someone has lost a brother, sister, mom, dad, cousin, etc. Because of recent rhetoric, we are being led to believe that undocumented immigrants are the main cause of these heartaches.

The first study I read was called “Unauthorized Immigration, Crime, and
Recidivism: Evidence from Texas“, written by Michael T. Light. This was a well-funded, well-researched report that looked at crime rates in Texas and California. Light divides his report into four sections, which I will break down with key findings now:

Section I: Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born U.S. citizens in Texas

Here is a chart that shows what number in each category commits each crime, per 100,000 people in the category. For example, if the rate is 4.8 for US-Born Homicides, that means an average of 4.8 homicides are committed by each 100K US-born people. These figures come from Texas between 2012-2018.

Here is a summary of the findings for this section:

“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, U.S.-borns are over two times more likely arrested for violent crimes, two and half times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over four times more likely to arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period.”

Section II: The Empirics of Immigration and Violence

Direct quote from the report:

The second section establishes the foundational empirics for a general criminological literature on the immigration-homicide nexus. Key findings include: 1) Immigrants generally exhibit lower rates of serious violent crime in California and Texas. This is true for overall rates of violence and homicide. 2) Violent crime rates among immigrants in California are lower than among immigrants in Texas, and the relative gap between native and foreign-born individuals is considerably larger in California. 3) In both states, there is substantial heterogeneity in the immigration-homicide relationship by race/ethnicity and national origin. Generally speaking, immigrants from Asian countries have especially low rates of homicide offending. 4) Relative to the U.S.-born population, the criminal histories of immigrants arrested for violent crimes are both less extensive and less severe.

Here is the chart from Texas:

And California:

In both cases, we can see US-Born Black people in Texas and both US-Born Black and Hispanic people in California are the most likely to commit murder. I’m certain there are socio-economic reasons for this, and I’ll definitely do a follow up post to expand on these findings.

What isn’t shown, of course, is immigrants committing more crime than those of us who were born here. Except, oddly, white immigrants in Texas? Weird.

Section III: Did Immigrant Crime Change During the Trump Administration?

This is low-key maybe one of, if not the most important finding for the question we are trying to answer. Quote:

“Section III answers important question about the extent to which immigrant criminality changed during the Trump administration. We find no evidence, descriptive or otherwise, to suggest that the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration had a meaningful effect on immigrant criminality, whether measured as violence, property, drug, or traffic offenses.”

Wouldya look at that.

Section IV: Research Note on Recidivism among Immigrants

Quote, “…section IV examines recidivism among the undocumented population and details the data limitations that caution against strong conclusions on this issue. Most notably, criminal justice databases rarely have information as to whether the defendant was eventually deported. As a result, we do not know if an individual restrains from recidivating or is simply removed the country and is thus no longer at risk to recidivate”

Summary

To conclude this study, the key findings are undocumented individuals commit FAR less crime than their legal and US-born peers. In addition, the rates haven’t dropped since Trump took office after Obama (no second term data yet).

Supporting Studies

The previous study was incredibly informative and I’d recommend reading the whole thing! To add credibility, I wanted to see what other studies out there have repeated the findings.

The first source is a study that looked at the crime rate overall compared to the percentage of immigrant population. The findings?

“The American Immigration Council compared crime data to demographic data from 1980 to 2022, the most recent data available. The data showed that as the immigrant share of the population grew, the crime rate declined. In 1980, immigrants made up 6.2 percent of the U.S. population, and the total crime rate was 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people. By 2022, the share of immigrants had more than doubled, to 13.9 percent, while the total crime rate had dropped by 60.4 percent, to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people. Specifically, the violent crime rate fell by 34.5 percent and the property crime rate fell by 63.3 percent.”

The next source is Stanford’s Ran Abramitzky, who wrote in a 2022 book called “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success”. Abramitzky’s findings echo the AIC’s:

“In their analysis of Census data from 1850 to 2020, Abramitzky and his co-authors find that, compared to U.S.-born individuals, immigrants as a group had higher incarceration rates before 1870 and similar rates between 1880 and 1950. Since 1960, however, immigrants have been less likely to be incarcerated than have the U.S.-born”.

There are some pieces that dispute this finding, such as from CIS and the Immigration Reform. In response to their attacks on Alex Nowrasteh’s work, Nowrasteh posted a rebuttal. If you want to read drama between research organizations, check out those links.

I didn’t use Nowrasteh’s findings because of these attacks – I wanted to show that the findings were repeated time and time again without Nowrasteh’s findings included.

Conclusion

To conclude, the studies show that immigrants, whether undocumented or legal, do not commit more crimes than their US-born counterparts. Sure, you can say “well one single crime committed by an undocumented person is too many!”. And yes, absolutely, but one crime committed by a US-born person is ALSO too many. The fact is, US-born people are the ones most likely to commit crime, so why aren’t we addressing crime committed by us? If we wanted to reduce crime the most, we’d take a look inside and address the cultural problems driving our own, home-grown crime.

Thanks for reading!