By Olivier Marie and Paolo Pinotti

In the late 1920s, President Herbert Hoover appointed a National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement to address rising concerns about crime. The Commission dedicated one of its final reports to the issue of “Crime and the Foreign Born,” which begins by noting that “[t]he theory that immigration is responsible for crime . . . is almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast” (National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1931, p. 23). Almost a century later, concerns about crime remain one of the most frequently expressed reasons for public opposition to immigration in countries around the world. Figure 1 plots the share of respondents in OECD countries worried that “immigrants increase crime” against the share of respondents worried that “immigrants take jobs away from natives,” which is another prominent public opinion concern (for example, Mayda 2006; Haaland and Roth 2020). Most countries lie  well above the 45-degree line, meaning that more people worry about the crime effects of immigration than about its labor market effects. This pattern holds especially for countries with a higher share of migrants over total population, indicated by larger circles. Evidence on the evolution of beliefs concerning immigrants and crime over time can be documented using survey evidence from the United States. For the past 30 years, Gallup has regularly surveyed a representative sample of Americans, asking them to consider various topics and “say whether immigrants to the United States are making the situation in the country better or worse, or not having much effect.” 1 When the topic is “the crime situation,” half or more of the Americans surveyed have answered “worse” in almost every wave. If these views have lately somewhat improved, with 42 percent of respondents choosing “worse” in 2019, this answer was still 18 points higher than the proportion answering that immigrants worsen their job opportunities in the same year. Perhaps surprisingly, economists have only recently begun to investigate the links between immigration and crime in a systematic way. Advances in methodology and data quality during the past few decades have made it possible to go beyond simple correlations and to assess the causal impact of immigration on crime. This evolution has had much in common with the study of the labor market effects of migration depicted in this journal by Peri (2016). In this paper, we first describe recent international trends in immigration and crime, exploring why migrants may at first appear much more criminally active in certain countries. We then discuss the theoretical framework and methodological tools that economists have used in thinking about the relationship between immigration and crime. We assess what these approaches have produced in various contexts as to the causal impact of immigration levels on crime rates. We review the evidence on this point so far, which overwhelmingly suggests that immigrants do not increase crime levels in the communities where they settle, and confirm this overall null-effect conclusion using newly collected international data. Finally, we consider the evidence on the links between access to legal work and the crime propensity of different kinds of immigrants, including refugees and those with irregular legal status. The relatively few papers that have probed this issue all conclude that legal status and work permits strongly decrease the probability that immigrants will become involved in crime.      

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 38, Number 1—Winter 2024—Pages 181–200 

By Dany Bahar; Meagan Dooley; Andrew Selee

The sudden, large-scale movement of nearly 5.2 million Venezuelans out of their country, most since 2014, with more than 4.2 million of them settling in other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, has raised concerns about how this is affecting receiving communities, with some politicians and pundits claiming that these new arrivals are leading to a rise in crime. Yet few studies have been conducted in the region that examine whether and what type of link may exist between immigration and crime, in part because immigration at this scale is a relatively new phenomenon in most Latin American countries, and this particular mass migration is so recent.1 This issue brief explores data in the three countries with the largest number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees as of 2020—Colombia, Peru, and Chile, which together host more than 2 million Venezuelan nationals—to better understand whether and what sort of relationship exists between this immigration and crime rates. Some of the datasets used are publicly available, while others were obtained by the authors through direct requests to government agencies. For each country, this study analyzes crime data, when possible disaggregated by nationality, and data on the presence of Venezuelans at the subnational level (though the available data do not allow for this to be done in exactly the same way in all three countries). For the most part, analysis of data from 2019 suggests that Venezuelan immigrants commit substantially fewer crimes than the native born, relative to their share in the overall population, signaling that public perceptions on newcomers driving up crime rates are misleading. In Chile, for example, only 0.7 percent of people indicted for crimes in 2019 were Venezuelan nationals, even though Venezuelans made up 2.4 percent of the population. Similarly, in Peru, where this analysis uses imprisonment data as a proxy for crime rates, 1.3 percent of those in prison were foreign born—of any nationality—as of 2019, whereas Venezuelan nationals make up 2.9 percent of the country’s overall population. For the most part, analysis of data from 2019 suggests that Venezuelan immigrants commit substantially fewer crimes than the native born. In Colombia this relationship holds true for violent crimes, as Venezuelan nationals comprised 2.3 percent of arrests for violent crimes in 2019, while they represent 3.2 percent of the population. For crimes overall, however, the picture is more mixed, as 5.4 percent of all arrests were of Venezuelans, a rate higher than their share of the population. Most of these crimes were reported in border regions, perhaps a reflection of the illicit smuggling networks that operate across the Colombian-Venezuelan border. In exploring plausible explanations for crime rates in different parts of the country, it appears that the regions in which Venezuelans were responsible for higher shares of crimes are also those where Venezuelans face higher rates of unemployment. This finding is consistent with the literature that suggests granting migrants and refugees formal labor market access can reduce the incidence of crime among this population. The data in this study provide strong evidence that the presence of Venezuelan immigrants is not leading to increased crime in the region—certainly not in the three countries that have received the largest number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees. Indeed, in most cases they tend to commit a smaller share of crimes than their proportion of the population. Even in the one case where the results are more ambiguous—Colombia—they are more involved in minor crimes and far less involved in major crimes than their population share. These results suggest that fears about Venezuelan newcomers driving up crime are simply misplaced. Sudden mass migration certainly presents challenges to receiving societies, but, at least in this case, a major crime wave is not one of them. 

Washington, DC; Brookings Institute, 2020. 27p.

By Pilatowsky, Eynel; Ruiz Contreras, Juanita

This document analyses public perception regarding migration in the region for 2023, using data collected by the Public Perceptions Laboratory on Migration. Social media monitoring shows a slight decrease in the conversation about migration compared to the previous year, but security remains the most relevant topic for the public. Concerns about crime and unemployment continue to be common, influencing the perceptions of host societies. Additionally, xenophobia remains present in public discourse, with an increase in xenophobic responses to institutional tweets. The report focuses on two dynamics of continental mobility: the arrival of Venezuelan population in specific countries and changes in public opinion regarding new migratory flows in El Darién and the Central American corridor towards the United States. The Laboratory aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of perceptions in the region to support decision-making and grasp the overall state of public opinion on regional migration dynamics.

023 Inter-American Development Bank.IDB , 2023. 20p.