IMMIGRANTS & CRIMEIllegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022
Crime committed by illegal immigrants is an important and contentious public policy issue, but it is notoriously difficult to measure and compare their criminal conviction rates with those of other groups such as legal immigrants and native‐born Americans. Most research, however, finds that all immigrants in the United States are less likely to commit crime or be incarcerated than native‐born Americans.
Crime committed by illegal immigrants is an important and contentious public policy issue, but it is notoriously difficult to measure and compare their criminal conviction rates with those of other groups such as legal immigrants and native‐born Americans. This policy analysis is the latest paper that attempts to resolve those data disputes by relying on detailed crime data from Texas. Over the 10‐year period from 2013 to 2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas for illegal immigrants was 2.2 per 100,000, compared to 3.0 per 100,000 for native‐born Americans. The homicide conviction rate for legal immigrants in Texas was 1.2 per 100,000. Illegal immigrants were 26 percent less likely than native‐born Americans to be convicted of homicide, and legal immigrants were 61 percent less likely. Criminal conviction data for crimes other than homicide are included, but readers should interpret them with caution because the quality of the data is suspect. The conviction and arrest rates of illegal and legal immigrants, separately and together, were lower than those of native‐born Americans for homicide and all crimes in Texas during the 2013–2022 period.
Introduction
Crime committed by illegal immigrants is an important public policy issue.1 The prevalence and types of crimes committed by illegal immigrants should guide the allocation of immigration enforcement resources—at the federal, state, and local levels—with the goal of removing those who are convicted of violent or property offenses.2 However, estimating illegal immigrant criminality is difficult due to various data constraints that have only recently been relaxed in Texas. This policy analysis is an update, improvement, and expansion of earlier Cato research that measured criminal conviction and arrest rates by immigration status in Texas.3 The data below are for all criminal convictions over a longer period, with a focus on homicide because it is the most serious crime and the one where the number of illegal immigrant offenders is least likely to be undercounted. Specifically, this policy analysis adjusts its methodology to account for criticisms of the quality of Texas crime data.
