Do Immigrants Commit More Crime?

In 2025 federal policy took as its stated premise that many undocumented immigrants are a threat to public safety. 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, requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain noncitizens who entered without permission, by fraud or without valid papers and are charged with, arrested for or convicted of burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, assault on a law enforcement officer or any crime causing death or serious injury.

The opposing claim (that immigrants are less crime-prone than the native-born) is backed by most of the modern U.S. empirical literature. Public perception is divided. Pew found in a January 2024 survey that 57% of Americans said the large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime and 39% said it has little impact on crime, while in PRRI's 2022 American Values Survey 61% said the statement that immigrants increase crime in local communities did not describe immigrants well.

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.

Data availability favors the split. ACS/Census residual methods estimate the legal and undocumented populations, and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) sends every arrestee’s fingerprints to DHS under Secure Communities. The check is common practice elsewhere; Texas alone keeps the answer, Light et al. say.

The most recent national estimate comes from Cato Institute analysis of 2024 ACS data (Nowrasteh & Landgrave, Briefing Paper No. 198). Using a modified residual method for ages 18–54:

The gap has narrowed lately. Cato's own series shows the undocumented rate at a low of 538 per 100,000 in 2022 and up 25% to the 674 of 2024, while in every year from 2010 to 2024 it stayed between 31% and 56% below the native-born rate.

Cato itself notes that the American Community Survey counts people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention for immigration violations rather than for violent or property crimes. Removing the 37,684 people in ICE detention at the end of fiscal 2024 lowers the undocumented incarceration rate to 356 per 100,000, which is 17% above the legal-immigrant rate rather than more than double it.

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, samples of 1.9 to 2.0 million native-born men and 127,000 to 353,000 immigrants.

Abramitzky et al. (NBER/AER 2024) cover men ages 18–40 from 1870 to 2020: immigrants have been incarcerated less than the U.S.-born since 1880, the gap widening from 1960 to about 60% less likely today, a raw gap that adjusting for age, marital status, state and race leaves mostly unchanged and adjusting for education widens.

Texas is uniquely informative because its DPS keeps the immigration status DHS returns for arrestees, with arrest reporting 96% compliant over 2011 to 2015. Light et al. (PNAS 2020) analyzed all 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, where their rate was considerably higher (31.2 against 18.2), and homicide, where the rates were roughly equal (5.0 against 4.8).

Undocumented violent-crime rates would match natives’ only if the actual undocumented population in Texas were under 45% of the accepted estimate, and property-crime rates only if it were 23%, scenarios the authors call highly implausible.

Texas DPS also publishes running raw counts, the numbers that circulate in this debate. As of 31 July 2026: 335,000+ people classified as illegal noncitizens charged with 601,000+ offenses since June 2011, including 1,132 homicide charges and 7,691 sexual assault charges, with 229,000+ convictions, 625 of them for homicide.

These numbers are real. But Texas DPS itself says the figures do not attempt to allege that illegal noncitizens commit more crimes than other groups. They are counts without population denominators. When Light et al. and Cato applied denominators to the DPS data, their per-capita rates were lower for undocumented immigrants.

The broad U.S. ecological literature most often finds no association between immigration and local crime, and negative ones outnumber positive ones. The National Academies’ brief on its 2015 report found higher immigrant concentrations associated with less crime. The Dallas Fed review concluded that the research overwhelmingly indicates immigrants are less likely than similar natives to commit violent and property crimes, adding that the limited research on unauthorized immigrants points the same way, although possibly with a higher propensity than legal immigrants. The Ousey & Kubrin meta-analysis of 51 studies from 1994 to 2014 found the average association was negative but very weak, with wide variation across studies.

A county with more immigrants and less crime does not automatically prove each immigrant is individually less crime-prone (the ecological fallacy). That is why individual-level data (incarceration and arrest) belong alongside area-level data, not in place of them.

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This section as one image: Texas’s arrest rates by status, and the running counts that circulate without a denominator.

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First-generation immigrants have far lower incarceration rates than U.S.-born men of the same origin, and the advantage shrinks by the second generation. 2000 Census, men aged 18 to 39: foreign-born Mexicans 0.70% incarcerated against 5.90% of the U.S.-born of Mexican descent; Salvadoran/Guatemalan 0.52% against 3.01%; Vietnamese 0.46% against 5.60%.

Butcher and Piehl’s evidence suggests that the widening of immigrants’ advantage from 1980 to 2000 is not the work of deportation and that migration selects people less crime-prone or more responsive to deterrence. Rumbaut and Ewing put the second generation’s rise down to assimilation into the family breakdown and addiction that raise crime among other natives.

Immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are disproportionately young working-age males, the peak offending demographic. This composition should raise their aggregate crime rates, yet they still show lower rates than natives, and the American comparisons on this page already restrict to an age band or control for age; only the Texas arrest rates are unadjusted.

Germany: in the Federal Criminal Police Office's 2024 report on crime in the context of migration, people it classes as Zuwanderer (asylum seekers, recognised refugees, people with tolerated status or staying unlawfully) were 8.8% of suspects for general crime, 172,000 of 1.97 million, and about 12% of suspects for homicide, against roughly 3.7% of residents (just over 3 million people in a country of 83.6 million). The group is not uniform: Ukrainians were over a third of it and 12.8% of its suspects, while people from the Maghreb states were 0.5% of it and 9.1% of its suspects. Sweden: people born abroad were registered as crime suspects at 2.5 times the rate of Swedish-born people with two Swedish-born parents in 2015 to 2018 (8.0% against 3.2%), higher for violent offences, and 1.8 times after adjustment for age, sex, education, income and municipality type. Greece: a study of the islands facing the Turkish coast found that a 1-percentage-point increase in the refugee share raised crime incidents by 1.7 to 2.5 percentage points, driven by crimes committed by refugees, with no change in crime by natives.

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. In Italy, Pinotti (AER 2017) found that obtaining legal status cut the crime rate of legalized immigrants by 0.6 percentage points on a baseline of 1.1%, roughly in half, which he puts down to blocked access to legal work.

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This section as one image: what Germany, Sweden, Greece and Italy show, and why their figures describe a different system.

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Undocumented offending outside Texas; offense categories across states; refugee-specific U.S. crime effects; recidivism after deportation for non-immigration crimes; whether police behavior changes arrest rates by status. A national dataset linking arrests, convictions and immigration status by state would matter most, and none exists.

No. Every American dataset with a denominator puts immigrants’ overall rates below the native-born. Cato’s estimates from the 2024 census survey give 1,195 incarcerated per 100,000 native-born Americans aged 18 to 54, 674 for undocumented immigrants and 303 for legal immigrants; leave out the 37,684 people ICE held for immigration violations and the undocumented figure falls to 356. The gap runs back to 1980 in Butcher and Piehl’s census work and to 1880 in Abramitzky and colleagues’ series. In Texas, the one state that keeps immigration status in its arrest records, Light and colleagues found undocumented immigrants with the lowest felony arrest rate in every category from 2012 to 2018, 96.2 violent felony arrests per 100,000 against 213 for the native-born; the state’s running counts of charges have no denominator, and its own page says they do not attempt to allege that illegal noncitizens commit more crimes than other groups.

Two things cut the other way. In Texas, legal immigrants’ sexual assault arrest rate was above the native-born rate, and the Center for Immigration Studies reads the state’s conviction data as putting illegal immigrants above the state average for homicide and sexual assault, a reading Cato’s later data dispute for homicide. And Germany records asylum seekers and refugees, and Sweden the foreign-born, as crime suspects at higher rates than natives, while refugee arrivals raised crime on the Greek islands; Italy’s legalisation, which roughly halved offending among immigrants who gained status, points at one reason, blocked access to legal work. Those figures describe a different system, and nothing here shows them carrying over to American immigration.

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