New Directions in Research on Immigration and Crime

By Charis E. Kubrin

The main objective of the project is to improve understanding of the immigration-crime relationship by addressing several important areas of inquiry. These areas of inquiry represent key omissions in the literature that merit attention. For example, next to no research has examined the robustness of the immigration-crime relationship across a substantially large and diverse range of neighborhoods across the U.S., which reflect different immigration contexts and histories. At the same time, with few exceptions, research largely lumps all immigrants together and neglects important differences across groups, whether by immigrant status or demographic or socio-economic background. Finally, little is known about how the immigration-crime relationship may be context dependent, and how immigration-related policies and practices may condition the immigration-crime relationship. Using data from a variety of sources over many years (2000-2016), we conduct a series of analyses that refine and advance our understanding of the immigration-crime relationship. These analyses address a variety of research questions including: How robust is the immigration-crime relationship? What are the appropriate ways to capture varied effects of immigrant groups on neighborhood crime rates? Does citizenship status matter? How do levels of assimilation impact how immigration and crime are associated? Which immigrant groups have crime reducing effects in neighborhoods? Which have crime enhancing effects? Another set of analyses consider the extent to which the broader city-context of reception as well as immigration-related policies and practices condition the immigration-crime relationship. These analyses address research questions including: Which city-level characteristics matter most for impacting the neighborhood immigration-crime relationship? How does immigration enforcement condition the relationship between immigration and crime? Do “sanctuary cities” attract crime-prone immigrants, reducing public safety overall? To achieve these goals and begin to answer these research questions, we collected, cleaned and merged data from many sources including crime data from police departments, public use Census and American Community Survey data, restricted data from the Census Data Center at UC Irvine, historical business data from Reference USA, and TRACFed data, among others. After considerable effort, we collected data for a sample of 415 cities in 2020 with at least 10,000 population, a sample of 480 cities in 2010, a sample of 168 cities in 2000, a subset of 310 cities with longitudinal data in 2010 and 2018, and a subset of 139 cities with longitudinal data in 2000 and 2010. No comparable neighborhood crime data set that covers such a large and diverse range of contexts currently exists.  (continued)    

Washington, DC: U.S. National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2025. 45p.