IMMIGRATION & CRIMELarge-Scale Study Finds No Link Between Crime and Unauthorized Immigration
One of America’s most politically charged questions is: does immigration drive crime? Now, one of the most geographically detailed studies of its kind ever conducted has an answer: unauthorized immigration does not drive crime rates in U.S. neighborhoods.
For more than two decades, Charis E. Kubrin has followed the data wherever it leads. As UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, she has built a career studying one of America’s most politically charged questions: does immigration drive crime?
Now, in one of the most geographically detailed studies of its kind ever conducted, Kubrin and colleagues have an answer.
“Consistent with the research base more generally, unauthorized immigration does not drive crime rates in U.S. neighborhoods,” says Kubrin, the study’s lead author. “Honestly, I wasn’t too surprised.”
Co-authored with Derek Christopher of Stanford University, Cheyenne Hodgen of UC Irvine, Xiaoshuang Iris Luo of the University of Akron, and John Hipp of UC Irvine, theirs is the first study to examine the unauthorized immigration-crime relationship at the neighborhood level on such a sweeping national scale. Their research, published today in the Journal of Urban Affairs, tracked crime trends across 11,500 neighborhoods — representing 46 million residents — in diverse U.S. cities between 2010 and 2018.
What they found: neighborhoods where the share of undocumented residents grew actually saw greater reductions in property crime and no significant change in violent crime, contrary to what many claim.
The gap between what researchers know and what the public believes is nothing new, Kubrin notes.
“Nearly 100 years ago, the Wickersham Commission published a report showing that involvement in crime is lower among immigrants than the native born,” she says, “a finding that made its way onto the front page of the New York Times in an article titled, ‘Wickersham Board Frees Foreign-Born of Big Crime Blame.’ That title says it all.”
To estimate the undocumented population at the neighborhood level, the research team accessed restricted individual-level Census data through a federal Research Data Center (RDC) and then applied an imputation method similar to those used by the Department of Homeland Security.
Here is where they relied upon the expertise of Christopher, who received his training at UC Irvine, earning an economics Ph.D. in 2022 before joining Stanford.
Christopher is one of few academic researchers to have published work leveraging such a method.
