Far-right politicians and their allies are making two dishonest claims about the connection between immigration and crime. First, they’re claiming there is currently a wave of violent crime in the United States. This is false. In fiscal year (FY) 2023, violent crime fell near its lowest rate in 50 years. Second, they are claiming that undocumented immigrants are the cause of this violent crime wave. This too is false and easily debunked by the data.

Research by the American Immigration Council looked at FBI data over a 23-year period and found that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans. Not only are immigrants less likely to commit violent crimes, but higher rates of immigration are associated with decreases in both violent and property crime in communities. Put differently, where there are more immigrants, there is less crime.

In FY 2023, a record 2.3 million immigrants were encountered at our southern border. If right-wing accusations were correct, we would expect that with record levels of immigration, we would also see record levels of violent crime, especially in border states. Yet in 2023, Texas saw a 15% drop in violent crime and Arizona saw an 8.8% drop. In a year with more migrants arriving than ever before, border states are reporting precipitous drops in crime rates.
Another study using arrest data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, an agency headed by a Republican appointee, compared the criminality of undocumented migrants, legal migrants, and native-born Americans between 2012 and 2018. Of the three groups, undocumented migrants had the lowest rates of committing crimes. This finding entirely refutes the right-wing argument that migrants are the source of a crime wave in American communities.

Washington, DC: Third Way, 2025. 4p.

By Amarat Zaatut and Stephanie M. DiPietro  

Ethnographic studies of immigration and crime were prominent in the early decades of the twentieth century, yet contemporary scholarship has been dominated by quantitative approaches. In this review, we heed the call of those who have lamented the “collective amnesia” and “newness fetish” that characterize much of contemporary criminology and revisit classic ethnographies of immigration and crime, with an emphasis on the unique methodological contributions of this early work. Next, we synthesize the small but growing body of contemporary ethnographic research on immigration and crime, which includes the policing of immigrant communities in the age of “crimmigration;” the lived experiences inside contemporary deportation/ detention regimes; the integration experiences of Muslims, a highly marginalized but understudied population; and immigrants’ unique vulnerabilities to and experiences of victimization, to illustrate the value of qualitative approaches for capturing the nuances of immigrants’ experiences in the new age of immigration.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2023. 6:285–306 

By Sungil Han

The association between immigration and crime has been the center of debates not only in the field of criminology but also in political arguments. However, consistent findings in empirical research show a null association or even crime reduction effects of immigration. To fill the gap in the literature and provide a more comprehensive understanding, this dissertation examines the immigration and crime nexus at multiple dimensions: individual, perceptual, and structural. Using data from various sources, the results of three studies note four important findings: (1) immigration/immigrant status holds a negative association with crime, (2) immigrants are different from non-immigrant residents regarding antisocial attitudes, presenting more favorable attitudes toward criminal behavior, (3) theoretical frameworks of the revitalization perspective and rational choice theory work in explaining lower levels of crime within immigrant groups or communities, and (4) cultural and environmental contexts matter to account for immigration and crime nexus. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are also discussed in the study.  

El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, 2020. 134p.