Public concerns about the costs of immigration and crime are high, and sometimes overlapping. This article investigates the relationship between immigration into a metropolitan area and that area's crime rate during the 1980s. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. In explaining changes in a city's crime rate over time, the flow of immigrants again has no effect, whether or not we control for other city-level characteristics. In a secondary analysis of individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that youth born abroad are statistically significantly less likely than native-born youth to be criminally active.
Immigration and crime are not only two of today's "hot-button" issues in politics, they seem to occupy the same region of the public mind. The constant juxtaposition of the words "immigration" and "crime" in news story after news story might forge the perception of a causal link between the two issues. Juxtaposition, however, is not the only way in which the two are linked by those in the policy arena.
A direct relationship is assumed to exist between illegal immigration and crime. 1 An explicit example of this is in Proposition 187 in California. This proposition has received most attention for the connections it asserts between illegal immigration and the rising costs of public expenditures on welfare and schools. However, the proposition also highlights victimization. Section 1 of the law reads, "The People of California find and declare as follows: . . . That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state."
Although illegal immigrants are typically cited as contributing to crime, there is also a great deal of legislative attention aimed at "criminal aliens" regardless
Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime