Donald Trump began his first presidential campaign with a now famous quote:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Donald J. Trump
Let’s ignore the fact that the quote falsely implies that the government of Mexico is somehow choosing who migrates to the border. And, let’s also ignore the sort of oddly warm and fuzzy ending to the quote. Let’s instead focus on the middle. The part that clearly equates immigrants to crime. Because, Trump hasn’t exactly softened his tone this time around. Let’s focus on the basic question: do more immigrants lead to more crime?
I admit, before trying to write this post, I had no idea as to the answer to this question. I could see some reasons why immigration might correlate to crime. For example, perhaps people who migrate are younger and male, a demographic more prone to crime. But, I could also see the opposite. Perhaps those that migrate are “go-getters” in search of a better life, folks less likely to commit crime.
I don’t know about you, but when I don’t know something — which is most of the time — I first look at some basic data and try to form an opinion. Are there any obvious trends that would give me some clue as to the answer? I also look at what experts say, in case the basic data is misleading. If the two line up, I feel pretty good. If not, I keep on digging. Let’s give it a shot.
Crime and Immigration: Data a Dummy Like Me Can Find
When I thought about a basic way to look at this question, two things sprang to mind. First, does having more immigrants seem to equate to higher rates of crime? Second, do places with more immigrants seem to have more crime?
On the first question, the figure below shows that the answer is pretty clearly “no”: more immigrants do not correlate to a higher national crime rate. Over the last 30 years, as immigrants have become a bigger and bigger share of the U.S. population, crime — the red line — has dropped. This correlation exists for immigrants as a whole and also for Mexican immigrants. Of course, most Americans don’t know that crime is dropping in the first place. So, maybe some people are blaming immigrants for the rise in crime that they think happened, but didn’t actually happen. Who knows.
Figure 1. Violent Crime Rate Per 100,000 and Immigrant Share of U.S. Population, 1989-2022
It’s worth noting that the above figure likely applies mainly to people here legally — people here illegally might avoid government survey takers. To make sure that I wasn’t missing something, I also equated border crossings — which could be legal or illegal — to national crime and again found no correlation at all.
Another way to look at the issue is to see if crime and immigration are correlated across places. After all, maybe crime is trending down nationally, but up in places welcoming more immigrants. Figure 2 shows this correlation for a 5-percent random sample of U.S. zip codes. On the x-axis, we have the non-citizen share of each zip code’s population. On the y-axis, a crime index value for that zip code — a higher number than 100 means that the area has more crime than average. The red line shows the simple linear relationship. The fact that the red line is going downwards means areas with more non-citizens have on average less crime.
Figure 2. Relationship Between Non-citizen Share of Zip Code and Crime
OK, so as immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population, crime has declined. And, areas with more non-citizens have less, not more, crime on average. But, this analysis is pretty darn basic. What do smarter people than I have to say?
Crime and Immigration: A Meta-Analysis from Smart People
Plenty of reason exists to doubt my very simple analysis above. Perhaps more immigrants want to come to the U.S. when crime is on the decline. Or, maybe immigrants want to settle in low-crime areas. In both these cases, my simple analyses would suffer from “reverse causality.” In these examples, low crime is causing immigrants to arrive or to settle in certain areas, but immigrants aren’t the ones causing lower crime.
To see what more careful analyses might say, I turned to a 2018 “meta analysis” in the Annual Review of Criminology by Graham C. Ousey and Charis E. Kubrin. A meta analysis looks across many studies and attempts to summarize the results. These authors summarized 51 studies on the topic based on their searches of several academic databases. Their main finding is perhaps best summarized by the following quote:
Overall, our narrative review reveals that the most common outcome reported in prior studies is a null or nonsignificant association between immigration and crime. Indeed, sixty-two percent of effect-size estimates reported in our sample are not statistically significant at the 0.05 level. At the same time, although statistically significant effect-size estimates are less common than null findings, it is noteworthy that the majority of the statistically significant results are negative, suggesting that greater immigration is associated with lower crime rates.
Ousey and Kubrin (2018)
To me, the most compelling evidence in the article comes from the longitudinal studies cited by the authors. These studies explore how crime changes within the same location as the share of that area comprised of immigrants changes. These studies attempt to get around “reverse causality.” After all, if immigrants move to areas because of low crime but then drive crime up, it would show up in that approach. These studies find that as the share of immigrants in an area increases, crime declines significantly. Those papers focusing specifically on Hispanic immigrants — those that former President Trump was speaking of — yield the same result.
So, are “they not sending their best?” I guess I don’t think “they” “send” anyone. But, the people that do decide to come to the U.S. don’t seem to be more prone to crime than anyone else, and perhaps less so.
The rate of crime may not be increasing, but if an illegal commits a crime, the logic is that if they were not here, that crime by that illegal would not have occurred I think we have enough of our home grown criminals, and don’t need one more..
Yes, and I’m fine with the idea that we want to regulate immigration and make sure that people who come here come here legally. But, what I am not fine with is implying that people who come here — legally or illegally — from certain countries are more prone to crime because of their background or ethnicity when the evidence doesn’t back it up. Yet, this point — on background and ethnicity — is the point often being made.
Agree!
The open border policy of the Biden/Harris administration has been a disaster. As a result US citizens have to bear the cost of housing and caring for these people and for educating their children. They compete for jobs against lower income Americans, depressing wages, harming the less fortunate US citizens. Some commit crimes. Don’t get hung up on the rhetoric, it’s the policy that has been so damaging to our country.
Thanks for the comment Chris, always appreciate a read. First, I don’t ignore rhetoric because rhetoric matters. Words matter. We shouldn’t suggest people who come here are more likely to commit crimes when they are not. It clouds the actual debate we should be having on the economic issues you bring up.
Second, I completely agree that an Open Border policy is a bad idea. As I say above, immigration should be regulated, and regulated better than it is now. But, recent attempts failed, most recently in 2023.