Preventing the admission of criminals has long been a concern to the public and policy makers. Even in the colonial period, there were laws against the arrival of criminals. Laws barring admission to the United States for those who have committed certain crimes remain in force today. A significant share of the public seems to believe that immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime. High-profile and sometimes tragic crimes committed by illegal aliens have prompted state and local officials to pledge action to rid the community of criminal aliens. Top federal immigration officials, as well as top congressional and executive branch officials, emphasize repeatedly that aliens who commit crimes are a top enforcement priority, partly by launching big-ticket programs to accelerate the pace of removals. Meanwhile, many advocates for immigrants and other immigration law enforcement skeptics insist that this attention is misplaced. They cite academic research claiming that immigrants actually are less prone to crime than natives.
This report explores the question of immigration and crime and finds that there is very little conclusive data to inform the well-entrenched views on both sides of the debate. We reviewed the major academic and government reports on the topic and found that these studies lead to contrary conclusions about immigration and crime. Moreover, the crime or incarceration data that do exist often are of limited value because they are unrepresentative in some way. It is also difficult to conclude much about crime associated with legal immigrants versus illegal immigrants. However, there is some indication that illegal immigrants have relatively high rates of crime, while legal immigrants have relatively low rates of crime.
In this report we use the words immigrant and foreign-born interchangeably. The foreign-born or immigrants are defined as persons living in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth.1 The foreign-born include non-citizens, both legal and illegal, as well as naturalized American citizens. The report is divided into three main parts: The first is a general discussion of why it is so difficult to study this question. Next, we focus on prior research that examined this question. In particular we focus on two recent studies that examined immigrant incarceration and the studies’ problems, particularly the lack of good data. Third, we examine new data that have become available as federal, state, and local governments have begun making a greater effort to ascertain and track the immigration status of criminal offenders. We also explore the limitations of this new data.