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January 13, 2025

The immigration–crime link

Nearly two centuries of data show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than US-born citizens.

Tyler Smith

Source: Spennelly

Since at least the 1800s, immigration and crime have frequently been linked in American political rhetoric and debates. But what does the data actually show? 

In a paper in the American Economic Review: Insights, authors Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres assembled the first comprehensive picture of immigrant incarceration rates spanning 150 years of US history. Their findings repudiate widely held assumptions about immigration and public safety and reveal new patterns in immigration–crime data.

For the period between 1870 and 1940, the researchers analyzed full-count decennial censuses, providing the most accurate measure of historical incarceration rates to date. From 1950 to 1990, they used the largest available census samples, and for 2005 onwards, they used American Community Survey data.

Figure 1 from the authors’ paper depicts six panels tracking incarceration rates among males between the ages of 18 and 40 for first-generation immigrants (orange circles) and US-born citizens (blue squares) for the period 1870–2019.

Figure 1 from Abramitzky et al. (2024)

Panel A shows that, while both groups had similar incarceration rates until 1960, a dramatic divergence occurred afterward. By 2019, US-born men were being incarcerated at rates around 3,000 per 100,000, while immigrant rates stayed below 1,500 per 100,000.

The other panels break down incarceration rates by immigrant origin, showing similar patterns for immigrants from Europe, China, Mexico and Central America, and other regions. (“Old Europeans” refers to immigrants from countries in the north and west of Europe; “New Europeans” refers to immigrants from countries in eastern and southern Europe.)

The authors’ work challenges the idea that immigration leads to higher crime rates. The data show exactly the opposite: throughout American history, immigrants have consistently had similar or lower incarceration rates than US-born citizens. This holds true across all immigrant groups, regardless of the origin country or time period of arrival. 

The researchers suggest that future work might explore the possible reasons for the stark divergence in incarceration rates after 1960, noting that around the same time, outcomes for immigrants also began to differ significantly from their US-born counterparts in other dimensions, such as labor-force participation and family formation rates.