Police and judicial spending is difficult to class as wholly public or private in the
nature of the service provided. Spending on, say, crime prevention or judicial services
will depend on how immigration affects crime rates which will depend, among other
things, on the tendency of immigrants to commit and to become victims of crime.
Bell and Machin (2013) survey evidence from several countries and conclude that
there is little evidence of immigration increasing crime. Butcher and Piehl (1998a)
find no evidence from cross-city comparisons of any effect from immigration on
crime once demographic differences are controlled for. Immigrants in the US are
substantially less likely than the native-born to be incarcerated, although, as with
many aspects of immigrant lives, there is assimilation over time (Butcher and Piehl,
1998b). Bianchi et al. (2012) find no support from police administrative data on
Italian provinces for any causal impact of immigration on overall crime rates except
possibly for robberies. Bell et al. (2013) compare two waves of immigration to the UK,
© 2014 The Authors.
The Economic Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Economic Society.
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finding some evidence of a connection, albeit small in magnitude, between an earlier
wave of largely asylum-driven migration and property crime but no other sort of
crime, whereas no evidence of a link to any sort of crime is found for the inflow
associated with EU accession countries after 2004. Jaitman and Machin (2013)
provide further evidence that any impact of immigration on crime rates in the UK is
weak.