By Gordon H. Hanson

Immigration reform is one of the most divisive issues confronting U.S. policymakers. The rise in the number of illegal immigrants in the United States over the past ten years—from five to twelve million—has led to concerns about the effects of illegal immigration on wages and public finances, as well as the potential security threats posed by unauthorized entry into the country. In the past year alone, the governors of New Mexico and Arizona have declared a “state of emergency” over illegal immigration, and President Bush signed into law the Secure Fence Act, which authorizes the spending of $1.2 billion for the construction of a seven-hundred-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. In this Council Special Report, Professor Gordon H. Hanson of the University of California, San Diego approaches immigration through the lens of economics.

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  The results are surprising. By focusing on the economic costs and benefits of legal and illegal immigration, Professor Hanson concludes that stemming illegal immigration would likely lead to a net drain on the U.S. economy—a finding that calls into question many of the proposals to increase funding for border protection. Moreover, Hanson argues that guest worker programs now being considered by Congress fail to account for the economic incentives that drive illegal immigration, which benefits both the undocumented workers who desire to work and live in the United States and employers who want flexible, low-cost labor. Hanson makes the case that unless policymakers design a system of legal immigration that reflects the economic advantages of illegal labor, such programs will not significantly reduce illegal immigration. He concludes with guidelines crucial to any such redesign of U.S. laws and policy. In short, Professor Hanson has written a report that will challenge much of the wisdom (conventional and otherwise) on the economics behind a critical and controversial issue.

Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations, 2007. 52p.

By Alex Nowrasteh

Crime committed by illegal immigrants is an important public policy issue that should affect the allocation of federal immigration enforcement resources, state and local law enforcement resources, and policies toward arresting, detaining, and removing illegal immigrants.1 This brief uses Texas Department of Public Safety data to measure the rate at which individuals were convicted and arrested by crime and immigration status in Texas in 2019. This brief is an update, expansion, and improvement of earlier publications that measured criminal conviction and arrest rates by immigration status in Texas in 2015, 2017, and 2018 using the same data source. The results in this updated brief show that in Texas in 2019, illegal immigrants were 37.1 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans and legal immigrants were about 57.2 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans. The conviction and arrest rates for illegal immigrants were lower than those for native-born Americans but higher than those for legal immigrants. This result holds for just about every type of crime, including homicide, sex crimes, larceny, and most other crimes.

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2021. 7p.

By Chisato Yoshida and Alan D. Woodland

This book is an extensive review of the current state of illegal immigration in Europe and North America whilst providing theoretical analysis. This analysis models illegal immigration in a two-country framework, highlights the inter-related labour markets and considers a range of immigration policy instruments, including border patrols and employer surveillance and sanctions. Distinguishing between scenarios with and without the international mobility of capital, this book also examines various profit-sharing arrangements.

Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 201p.

By Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester and Michelangelo Landgrave

Donald J. Trump launched his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in June 2015 by comments on illegal immigrants and the crime they commit in the United States. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”1 A few weeks after Trump’s announcement, 32- year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant Jos´e Inez Garc´ıa Z´arate in San Francisco, California. Although Z´arate was later acquitted of all murder and manslaughter charges due to mistakes made by the prosecutor, his shooting of Steinle seemed to support Trump’s worry about illegal immigrants causing a crime spree and helped win him the election in 2016. As tragic as the shooting and death of Kate Steinle was, it was one of the 13,455 murders that year in the United States and it does not tell us how many of those victims were murdered by illegal immigrants.2 The most important measure that matters when judging the crime rates of illegal immigrants is how likely they are to be criminals compared to other sub-populations. If illegal immigrants are more likely to be criminals then their presence in the United States would raise crime rates, supporting Trump’s assertions. But if illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime then they would lower the nationwide crime rate. Politically, this debate spills over to evaluating whether domestic immigration enforcement policies reduce crime. Illegal immigrant crime is also central to the debate over sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to turn over many illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the effects of a border wall, and whether Border Patrol requires more resources to counter crime along the border. Answering whether illegal immigrants are particularly crime prone is essential to addressing these concerns and setting efficient anti-crime policies.

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2020. 30p.

By Walter A. Ewing, Daniel E. Martinez and Rubén G. Rumbaut

For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education. In other words, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are not “criminals” by any commonly accepted definition of the term. For this reason, harsh immigration policies are not effective in fighting crime. Unfortunately, immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence. As a result, immigrants have the stigma of “criminality” ascribed to them by an ever-evolving assortment of laws and immigration-enforcement mechanisms. Put differently, immigrants are being defined more and more as threats. Whole new classes of “felonies” have been created which apply only to immigrants, deportation has become a punishment for even minor offenses, and policies aimed at trying to end unauthorized immigration have been made more punitive rather than more rational and practical. In short, immigrants themselves are being criminalized.

Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2015. 28p.

Edited by Marlou Schrover, Joanne van der Leun, Leo Lucassen and Chris Quispel

Two issues come to the fore in current debates over migration: illegal migration and the role of gender in illegal migration. This incisive study combines the two subjects and views the migration scholarship through the lens of the gender perspective, investigating definitions of citizenship and the differences in mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion for men and women, producing a comprehensive account of illegal migration in Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Malaysia, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East over the nineteenth- and the twentieth centuries.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 196p.

By M. C. Chiuri, G. De Arcangelis, A. M. D'Uggento and G. Ferri

The Survey on illegal migration in Italy (SIMI henceforth) aims to analyse the phenomenon of clandestines migrating to or through Italy. SIMI contains information concerning the main demographic, economic and social characteristics of a sample of 920 clandestines crossing Italian borders and apprehended during 2003. Individual motivations to migrate, migrants’ intentions to return, their expectations about income at destination and their intended remittance rates are collected within SIMI and discussed in this paper. Evidence generally corroborates the predictions of the pertinent literature on development economics with respect to the decision to migrate. Apprehended illegal migrants expected to earn about 8-10 times their income at home, had they reached final destination. The median cost of the trip is more than a yearly average income. One of the conclusions of the survey is that future migratory flows may be massive, as the interviewees (typically in the mid-20s and with family and friends at home that are ready to join in the future) perceive themselves as frontrunners among nationals in their age cohort.

Italy: CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics, 2007. 22p.