Immigration Still Doesn't Increase Crime Rates

Fear of foreigners, xenophobia, and other sources of intuition about immigration and crime are surprisingly persistent in the face of evidence to the contrary, and a few well publicized incidents can play into those cognitive biases. Republicans, who are less connected with factual reality, are much more likely to believe that there is a crime-immigration connection, than Democrats.

In a new Pew Research Center report about the situation at the US-Mexico border, 57% of Americans say the large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime. . . . it flies in the face of years of studies looking at what actually happened after immigrants came to communities across the US. Many researchers crunching the numbers have found there’s no connection between immigration and crime. Some have even found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the US. . . .  

when those surveyed were asked specifically about the impact of the migrant influx on crime, there were stark differences across party lines, with 85% of Republicans linking the migrant influx to crime, compared to 31% of Democrats. The survey also found that 39% of Americans don’t think the migrant influx has much of an impact on crime. The Pew report is based on a survey of 5,140 adults conducted from January 16-21. . . .

Across a variety of studies that use different years of data that focus on different areas of the United States – with some exceptions, there’s some nuance there. I don’t want to deny the nuance – in general, on average, we do not find a connection between immigration and crime, as is so often claimed. The most common finding across all these different kinds of studies is that immigration to an area is either not associated with crime in that area, or is negatively associated with crime in that area. Meaning more immigration equals less crime. It’s rare to find studies that show crime following increases in immigration or with larger percentage of the population that are immigrants. . . . 

New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban recently described a “wave of migrant crime” in the city as he announced a bust in a ring of cell phone thefts. Is that what’s happening?

There’s an increase in robbery. Is the increase enough to call it a crime wave? No. Are you sure the migrants were responsible for the increase in robbery? No. Do we know if the victims were also migrants? No. … It’s tough to call it a migrant crime wave when we don’t know all these things.

Is there any big-picture data that you would look at to think about what the impact might be of this large number of recent arrivals in the city?

When a New York Daily News reporter asked me about this recently, I gave her what I thought was a good formula: Why don’t you take police precincts that have shelters in them and just look at that sample. Is crime up? Is crime down? 

That report in the New York Daily News ended up finding that, in the places they looked at where shelters are located, crime is down this year compared to the same time last year in most categories.

From CNN.