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
