This publication seeks to advance the understanding of immigration, crime, and crime reporting at the local level with a synthetic population.
This report, funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and prepared by RTI International, concludes that policymakers should be cautious about linking increases in crime rates to unauthorized immigrant populations without robust evidence, and that the presence of authorized immigrants is associated with lower crime rates, consistent with the existing body of research. The results suggest the need to delve into how authorized and unauthorized immigrants qualitatively differ and why the association with crime rates may vary by documentation status. The study also found that across the different jurisdiction types there is no significant association between estimated unauthorized immigrant population and arrest rates when accounting for known correlates of crime and correcting for robustness tests. Additionally, increases in the authorized immigrant population are found to be associated with lower crime rates for drug, property, and violent crime types in emerging immigrant destination jurisdictions and associated with lower drug crime rates in traditional immigrant destinations. The negative association between authorized immigration and crime rates confirms prior studies and suggests areas for further investigation that focus on understanding the mechanisms through which immigration status may impact offending. The study employs crime and crime reporting data from ten jurisdictions across the United States paired with a synthetic population that estimates the unauthorized immigrant population. Analyses focus on unauthorized immigration and its correlation with drug, property, and violent crime rates, while accounting for crime reporting in traditional and emerging immigrant destinations along with sites with low foreign populations. At the individual level, first-generation immigrants tend to have lower arrest rates than native-born citizens. Yet this trend diminishes with subsequent generations, as the children of first-generation immigrants are often arrested at similar rates to children of native-born citizens. This study attempts to control for the nuances of crime reporting among immigrant populations.
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