Immigration and Crime: What the Data Actually Shows

In 2025–2026, the claim that immigrants — especially undocumented immigrants — commit crime at higher rates than native-born Americans has become central to federal policy. The Trump administration’s January 20, 2025 executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” framed immigration enforcement as a public-safety priority. The Laken Riley Act, signed January 29, 2025, mandated ICE detention for noncitizens charged with theft, burglary, or similar crimes. ICE arrests doubled post-inauguration, with DHS reporting 70% of arrests involved people convicted of or charged with crimes.

The opposing claim — that immigrants are less crime-prone than the native-born — is backed by most of the modern U.S. empirical literature. But public perception remains divided: Pew found in February 2024 that 57% of Americans said the migrant influx leads to more crime, while PRRI found in October 2024 that 43% agreed immigrants increase local crime and 54% disagreed.

This distinction is not a technicality — it is central to interpreting every dataset in this article. Legal immigrants undergo background checks and admissibility screening that may select against criminality. Undocumented immigrants face deportation risk as an additional deterrent but lack systematic national tracking in most crime databases. Political rhetoric often blurs the two, citing total “criminal alien” removals that include both statuses, or raw counts that do not disaggregate precisely.

Data availability favors the split: ACS/Census residual methods can identify legal vs. undocumented populations; Texas DPS uses DHS Secure Communities/IDENT matching for arrests. Outside Texas, almost no jurisdiction systematically records status at arrest or conviction.

The most recent national estimate comes from Cato Institute analysis of 2023 ACS data (Landgrave & Nowrasteh, Policy Analysis No. 994, April 2025). Using a modified residual method for ages 18–54:

The gap is not new. Butcher & Piehl (NBER Working Paper 13229) tracked men ages 18–40 across Census decades: native-born institutionalization was 1.35% vs. immigrants 0.42% in 1980, widening to 3.45% vs. 0.68% by 2000 — sample sizes exceeding 1.8 million native-born and 350,000 immigrants.

Abramitzky et al. (NBER/AER 2024) extended the series from 1870 to 2020, finding immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the U.S.-born for most of the modern period since 1960 — approximately 60% less likely, even after controlling for age, education, race, and state.

Texas is uniquely informative because its DPS criminal history system links arrestees to DHS status data with 96% compliance. Light et al. (PNAS 2020) analyzed all jailable felony arrests 2012–2018:

Undocumented immigrants had the lowest felony arrest rates across every category shown. Legal immigrants were usually in the middle, with two exceptions: sexual assault (legal: 31.2, native: 18.2) and homicide (legal: 5.0, native: 4.8) — where legal immigrants were at or above native rates in this dataset.

Sensitivity analysis: to make undocumented violent-crime rates reach parity with natives, the actual undocumented population in Texas would have to be less than 45% of the accepted estimate. For property crime, 23%. These thresholds are implausibly low.

Texas DPS also publishes running raw counts that are the most politically cited numbers in this debate. As of March 2026: 335,000+ people classified as illegal noncitizens charged with 597,000+ offenses, including 1,123 homicide charges and 7,629 sexual assault charges, with 224,000+ convictions since June 2011.

These numbers are real. But Texas DPS itself states these figures do not establish that undocumented immigrants commit more crime than other groups. They are counts without population denominators. When researchers apply denominators to the same underlying Texas data, the per-capita rates consistently show lower rates for undocumented immigrants.

The broad U.S. ecological literature finds no positive association and often a negative one between immigration and local crime. The National Academies issue brief (2015) found that higher immigrant concentrations are associated with lower crime. The Dallas Fed review concluded the empirical evidence “comes down decidedly” on the side of immigrants being less likely to commit crime. The Ousey & Kubrin meta-analysis found the average association was negative but weak, with 62% of effect sizes statistically insignificant.

The ecological-fallacy caveat matters: a county with more immigrants and less crime does not automatically prove each immigrant is individually less crime-prone. That is why the strongest analysis uses individual-level data (incarceration and arrest) alongside area-level data, not in place of it.

First-generation immigrants show markedly lower crime rates than comparable native-born people, but the advantage shrinks across generations. 2000 Census data: foreign-born Mexican men 0.70% incarcerated vs. U.S.-born Mexican 5.90%; Salvadoran/Guatemalan foreign-born 0.52% vs. U.S.-born 3.01%; Vietnamese foreign-born 0.46% vs. U.S.-born 5.60%.

Leading explanations: positive self-selection (migration costs/risks filter for law-abiding traits), deportation deterrence for noncitizens, stronger family/community controls in immigrant communities, and then gradual convergence through acculturation — the second generation adopts native behavioral patterns including higher-risk ones.

Immigrants — especially undocumented immigrants — are disproportionately young working-age males, the peak offending demographic. This composition should elevate their aggregate crime rates. Yet they still show lower rates than natives. This makes the lower-crime finding more impressive, not less: the gap persists or widens after age/sex adjustment in every major study.

European patterns differ in ways that matter. Germany (BKA 2024): temporary migrants (asylum seekers, undocumented) were 8.8% of criminal suspects vs. ~4.3% of population. Sweden: foreign-background individuals ~2.5x overrepresented among violent-crime suspects. Greece: a 1-percentage-point increase in refugee share increased crime incidents 1.7–2.5 percentage points.

The U.S.–Europe gap is not one side lying. The contexts genuinely differ: U.S. immigration combines family, labor, and screened refugee migration; Europe’s recent debates center on asylum seekers in legal limbo with weak work access and mass proximate inflows. Italy’s legalization evidence (Pinotti, AER 2017) is instructive: legalization reduced serious crime from 2.9 to 1.2 per 100 applicants, strongly suggesting that irregular status and blocked work access matter.

A serious restrictionist argument is not “all immigrants are criminals.” It is this:

National undocumented offending outside Texas; fine-grained offense categories across states; refugee-specific U.S. crime effects; recidivism after deportation for non-immigration crimes; whether local police behavior changes arrest rates differently by status. A true national linked dataset of arrests, convictions, immigration status, and exposure time by state would matter most. It does not exist.