In this study, the researchers explored the connections between illegal immigration, immigration policy, and victimization risk.
The goal of this project was to advance understanding of the links between undocumented immigration, immigration policy adoption and enforcement, and exposure to nonfatal victimization. This project aimed to address these research questions using restricted-use data from 2016-2020 the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), capitalizing on the introduction of a new item on citizenship status integrated for the first time in the NCVS in 2016. The NCVS offers a unique opportunity to assess the impact of immigrant concentration on victimization risk with data that incorporate crimes not reported to the police. This analysis of the NCVS reinforces findings showing that a larger share of documented immigrants is associated with less crime. Additionally, the NCVS data analyzed shows that a relatively larger share of undocumented immigrants in a county does not translate into higher levels of crime, which is consistent with other recent analyses based on data gathered by the police. There is theoretical and empirical uncertainty about the impact of undocumented immigration and immigration law enforcement policies on crime exposure. This project was motivated by the reality of the theoretical diversity of views on how differences in immigration and immigration policies may impact crime, coupled with an empirical knowledge base that had yielded uncertain answers. It is important to provide policymakers with empirical evidence that more closely matches the central questions that define contemporary debates, and in this instance one critical question that had been neglected is whether community differences in undocumented immigration affect the likelihood of being criminally victimized. The researchers aimed to examine directly how local immigration policy implementation and enforcement actions affect crime among persons of different racial-ethnic backgrounds, as measured in a nationally representative survey of victimization.