Andrew Forrester, Michelangelo Landgrave, and Ipublished anew working paper on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. Our paper is slated to appear as achapter in avolume published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Like our other research on illegal immigration and crime in Texas, this working paper uses data collected by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) that records and keeps the immigration statuses of those arrested and convicted of crimes in Texas. As far as weve been able to tell, and weve filed more than 50 state FOIA requests to confirm, Texas is the only state that records and keeps the immigration statuses of those entering the criminal justice system. Texas gathers this information because its runs arrestee biometric information through Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases that identify illegal immigrants. Unlike other states, Texas DPS keeps the results of these DHS checks that then allows amore direct look at immigrant criminality by immigration status.
The results aresimilar to our other work on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants, and 1,422 per 100,000 nativeborn Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45 percent below that of nativeborn Americans in Texas. The general pattern of nativeborn Americans having the highest criminal conviction rates followed by illegal immigrants and then with legal immigrants having the lowestholds for all of other specific types of crimes such as violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes.
Since Texas is the only state that records and keeps the immigration statuses of those arrested, we cant make adirect applestoapples comparison between Texas and other states (every state should record and keep this information so we can answer this important question). It could be that illegal immigrants in Texas are the most lawabiding illegal immigrant population in the country or the least lawabiding. Until other states start recording and keeping the data, wewont know for sure. But there is much suggestive evidence that the illegal immigrant criminal convictionrate in Texas is comparable to their crime rates across the country.
For instance, the ratio of the nationwide estimated illegal immigrant incarceration rate to the native and legal immigrant incarceration rates is very similar to the same ratios for the criminal conviction rate in Texas. The similarity is evidence that the pattern in Texas holds nationwide, at least to the extent that convictions and incarcerations are correlated. The only way that illegal immigrants could have ahigher incarceration rate is if there is something seriously wrong with our method of estimating their total population in the United States and the actual number is much smalleror we are seriously undercounting illegal immigrants who are incarcerated. Neither is very likely, but its important to mention the possibility.
We go abit further in this working paperby looking at how local variation in the illegal immigrant population is correlated withcrimerates on the country level in Texas for the years 20122018. The relationship between changes in the illegal immigrant population and crime is known as an elasticity. The elasticity between two variables estimates how one variable, the illegal immigrant population here, affects another variable like the number of illegal immigrant convictions or the total crime rate. We control for the number of law enforcement officers per capita. We basically find no relationship. The only statistically significant relationship worth reporting is anegative association between total violent crime convictions and the illegal immigrant share with apoint estimate of -0.104 that is significant at the 5percent level. This exception suggests that a10 percent increase in the illegal immigrants share of the population is associated with a1 percent decline in violent crime convictions in our sample of Texas counties.
Our working paper isnt the only new research on illegal immigration and crime. Christian Gunadi, an economist who recently graduated from the University of California Riverside, examined how the DACA program affected crime rates. Gunadi tested the theory, based on Gary Beckers crime research, that issuing work permits to young illegal immigrants increasesthe opportunity cost of committing crime by making it easier for them to be legally employed. Gunadi found, when he analyzed the individuallevel incarceration data, that there was no evidence that DACA statistically significantly affected the incarceration rate of young illegal immigrants. Gunadi also looked at crime on the state level and found that the implementation of DACA is associated with areduction in property crime rates such that an additional DACA application approved per 1,000 population is associated with a1.6 percent decline in the overall property crime rate. That second finding is consistent with the Beckerian crime model.
Other recent research into immigration and crime similarly find no relationship between immigration and crime or aslightly negative relationship, but their methods are not as robust so Idont place as much weight on them. However, arecent working paper written by Conor Norris and published at the Center for Growth and Opportunity used differenceindifferences and the synthetic control method to see how the passage of SB-1070in Arizona in 2010, which was an immigration enforcement law, affected crime there relative to other states. It found that violent crime in Arizona increased by about 20 percent under both methods.
Norris paper is interesting and worth developing further. For instance, most of the research on the economics of crime focuses on how higher opportunity costs lowers crime rates. In that way, increasing legal employment opportunities can lower crime while making it more difficult for illegal immigrants to work can push some of them toward committing crimes because theyd have less to lose. In 2007, the Arizona state legislature passed the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) that mandated EVerify on January 1, 2008. EVerify is intended to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants. Forrester and Iwrote ashort blog post showing that the passage of LAWA may have increased the monthly flow of noncitizens into Arizona state prisons, but the effect was shortlived as many illegal immigrants either left the state or figured out how to get around EVerify.
The above new research and the vast quantity of papers on how immigration doesnt increase crime and frequently lowers it leads to an interesting question: Why do so many people think that immigration increases crime? The Christian Science Monitor had an interview segment recently where they asked criminologists why so many Americans think immigrants increase crime even though the weight of evidence says that they are less likely to commit crimes than nativeborn Americans. According to arecent Gallup poll, 42 percent of respondents thought that immigrants increase crime, 7percent thought that immigrants decrease crime, and 50 percent said immigrants didnt affect crime.
Much of the effect could be that people who dont like immigration could just ascribe all types of negative behavior to them in order to justify their dislike. This probably explains alot of it, but it would be adisservice to stop there. We must examine the possible other reasons. Another potential reasonis that many people think that immigrant criminals could have been prevented from coming in the first place, so theres more of afocus on their crimes (availability bias) because many people think that they are more preventable than crimes committed by nativeborn Americans. In that way, many people could think that allowing any crime by immigrants is achoice and that crime could go away at the stroke of apen. Thats not how the world works and that doesnt explain why so many people think that crime rates go up with immigration, but if that form of control bias is combined with aconflation between the number of crimes and the crime rate then the mistake is understandable if not based on an accurate understanding of the variables.
Another reason could be that nativeborn Americans who have the same ethnicity asrecent immigrants might have amuch higher incarceration rate, so the respondents to these surveys lump them in together and conclude that immigrants boost the crime rate. Among nativeborn Americans, Hispanics do have ahigher incarceration rate but Asians have amuch lower rate. This is further complicated by the fact that Puerto Ricans, who are not immigrants, likely have the highest incarceration rate of any Hispanic subgroup in the United States (see Table 1) and it would be quite silly for someone to blame immigrants for the higher Puerto Rican incarceration rate.
There is more and more evidence that immigrants, regardless of legal status, are less likely to commit crimes than nativeborn Americans. However, asubstantial number of Americans still think that immigration increases crime. As more evidence builds over time, we can only hope than Americans respond by updating their opinions so that they fit the facts.
Read the rest here:
New Research on Illegal Immigration and Crime - Cato Institute