The Volokh Conspiracy
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More Evidence that Immigrants - Including Illegal Ones - Have Much Lower Crime Rates than Natives
A new Cato Institute study further refutes claims that illegal migration is somehow causing a crime wave.
Claims that illegal immigration is causing a crime wave are ubiquitous on the political right, and likely helped Trump win the 2024 election. But social science studies consistently show that immigrants - including illegal ones - actually have much lower crimes than native-born Americans. A new analysis by my Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh and political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave is the most thorough and up-to-date assessment yet.
Alex summarizes their findings here:
Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated….
A persistent criticism of Cato's paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It's certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….
Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn't make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.
It's worth pointing out that legal and illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates than their ethnic and racial counterparts in the native-born population in every case. Furthermore, black legal or illegal immigrants do not have the highest incarceration rates. Immigrants don't just have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans because black Americans have such a high rate, but because immigrants of every racial and ethnic group have lower incarceration rates than their native-born ethnic and racial counterparts.
Nowrasteh and Landgrave find that both legal and illegal immigrants of every racial/ethnic group (black, white, Asian, Hispanic) have lower crime rates than native-born Americans generally, and (with one exception) also much lower rates than native-born whites. The one exception is Hispanic illegal immigrants (incarceration rate of 879 per 100,000), which is modestly higher than native-born whites (741). But even that exception is likely driven by the fact that these figures don't fully control for the fact that illegal migrants are younger and have a higher percentage of males than native-born citizens (young people and men have much higher crime rates than older people and women). Moreover, some crime committed by illegal migrants is a consequence of their illegal status: difficulty finding legal employment likely incentivizes some to participate in illegal markets, where there is more violence than in the legal sector.
In sum, immigration - including the illegal kind - is actually reducing our crime rate, not raising it. There is no immigrant-driven crime wave. Much the contrary.
A common response to such data is to say that any immigrant-driven crime is intolerable, especially if committed illegal migrants. Even one additional murder or rape is one too many!
But this logic implies that any significant population increase is bad. After all, any large group of people inevitably includes at least a few violent criminals. That suggests increases in the birth rate (a high priority for many right-wing pro-natalists) are bad. After all, some of these children will grow up to be criminals! It also indicates the US was wrong to accept the ancestors of most native-born Americans. Some of them were criminals, too!
Claims that crimes committed by illegal migrants are in a different moral universe from those committed by other people are flawed for the same reasons that "I'm for legal immigration" arguments are generally defective. See my discussion of that fallacy here. A murder or rape committed by an illegal migrant is no worse (and no better) than one committed by anyone else.
Ultimately, we should focus on reducing crime rates, not absolute amounts of crime. The latter objective has the perverse implication that a larger population is generally worse than a smaller one, since, other things equal, more people means more crime.
But even if our goal is to reduce the absolute amount of crime rather than the rate, immigration restrictions are the wrong approach to achieving that objective. Resources devoted to deporting people with a low crime rate can be more profitably devoted to targeting actual criminals, thereby by deterring and otherwise preventing many more crimes. In Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I estimate that transferring the tens of billions of dollars currently spent on immigration enforcement to ordinary law enforcement would enable us to put tens of thousands of additional police officers on the streets; social science evidence indicates that can greatly lower crime rates, thereby preventing vastly more crime than enforcement of immigration restrictions does.
Moreover, immigration restrictions - like other laws that create a black market, such as that in alcohol during Prohibition - actually increase violent crime, by creating opportunities or organized criminals. Reducing or eliminating restrictions can reducs that problem, just like the end of Prohibition reduced violent crime associated with Al Capone and other participants in the illegal alcohol industry.
In addition, increased immigration creates vast new wealth, and improves the government's fiscal position (reducing budget deficits). If necessary, some of that extra wealth can be invested in expanding law enforcement budgets.
In sum, if crime is your concern, immigration restrictions are part of the problem, not part of the solution. It would be better to make legal migration easier, and transfer resources from immigration enforcement to ordinary police.
