Michelangelo and Andrew Forrester published a working paper about illegal immigration and criminality in Texas. Our paper will appear in a chapter of a book published by Oxford University Press 2021. As with our other research into illegal immigration and crime, this paper is based on data collected by Texas Department of Public Safety. This DPS records and maintains the immigration status of Texas criminals and arrestees. Our research has shown that Texas is one of the few states that maintains and records the immigration statuses and convictions of criminal defendants. We’ve made more than 50 FOIA requests to confirm this. Texas is able to collect this information due to the fact that it has access to arrestee biometrics via Department of Homeland Security (DHS), databases that allow for illegal immigrants to be identified. Texas DPS saves these DHS check results. This allows Texas DPS to examine the immigrant criminality according to immigration status.
Similar results were obtained in our previous work on illegal immigrant crime and immigration in Texas. In 2018, there was a 782 illegal immigrant-related criminal conviction rate for 100,000 illegal immigrants. This compares to 535 for 100,000 legal immigration and 1,422 in the 100,000 nativeborn Americans. The illegal immigrant crime conviction rate was 45% lower than the nativeborn Americans of Texas. The pattern is that nativeborn Americans have the highest crime conviction rates. Illegal immigrants then have the lowest for specific types of crimes.
Texas is the only state to keep records of the immigration statuses and arrests. This makes it difficult to compare Texas with other states. However, every state should keep these information in order for us to answer this important question. The possibility exists that Texas’ illegal immigrants are either the most lawabiding or least lawabiding. It is not yet known if other states will start to record and keep the data. There is evidence to suggest that the Texas illegal immigrant crime rate is similar to other states across the country.
The nationwide illegal immigrant incarceration ratio to the legal and native immigrant rates is very similar with the Texas criminal conviction rate. This is evidence that Texas’s pattern is consistent across all states, except where convictions are related to incarcerations. Illegal immigrants can only have a higher incarceration rates if our methods of estimating their total US population are incorrect or we are severely undercounting illegal immigrant incarcerated. It is not likely that either of these scenarios will occur, but it is worth mentioning.
This paper examines how local variation among illegal immigrants is correlated to Texas crime rates over the period 2012-2018. An elasticity is a measure of the relationship between crime and changes in illegal immigrant populations. The relationship between two variables, the illegal immigrant community here, and another variable, like the number illegal immigrant convictions, or the total criminal rate, is called an elasticity. We also take into account the number of police officers per head. There is no correlation. The only statistically significant correlation worth reporting is a negative relationship between total violent crimes convictions (with a point estimate at 0.104), and illegal immigrant percentage (with a value of 5 percent). This exception shows that a 10% rise in illegal immigrants is associated to a 1 percent decrease in violent crime convictions within our Texas sample.
Our paper is not the only research that has been done on illegal immigration and criminality. Christian Gunadi, an economic graduate from the University of California Riverside recently examined the effects of DACA programs on crime rates. Gunadi tested a theory based off Gary Becker’s criminal research that DACA gives young illegal immigrants work permits, increasing the likelihood of them committing crimes and making it easier to find legal employment. Gunadi looked at individual-level incarceration data and found that DACA had no statistically significant effect on the incarceration of young illegal immigrant.
Gunadi also looked into crime at state level. Gunadi found a decrease of property crime rates with DACA. Gunadi estimated that an additional DACA applicant per 1,000 population would result in a 1.6 percentage drop in overall crime. This second finding is consistent the Beckerian model of crime.
Recent research on crime and immigration has also found no correlation between the two. However, their methods are less robust and I don’t believe they are as reliable as mine. However, a recent working paper written by Conor Norris and published at the Center for Growth and Opportunity used differenceindifferences and the synthetic control method to see how the passage of SB-1070 in Arizona in 2010, which was an immigration enforcement law, affected crime there relative to other states. Both methods showed that Arizona’s violent crime increased by around 20%.
The paper by Norris is fascinating and well worth further research. Research on economics of crime has largely focused on how higher opportunities cost lower crime rates. Therefore, while legal employment options can reduce crime, making it harder for illegal migrants to work can encourage some people to commit crimes. Arizona’s 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), mandated EVerify to be implemented on January 1, 2008. EVerify was created to stop illegal immigrants from being hired. Forrester, along with me, wrote a brief blog post showing that while LAWA may have increased noncitizens entering Arizona state prisons monthly, it was only temporary. Many illegal immigrants either left Arizona or found ways to bypass EVerify.
The new research and many papers that have been published on immigration and how it doesn’t increase or decrease crime leads us to an interesting question. In a recent interview, the Christian Science Monitor asked criminalologists why Americans believe that immigrants make it more difficult to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Gallup polls found that 42% of respondents believed immigrants increased crime, 7% thought they decreased it, and 50% said that immigrants did not affect crime.
It could be that immigrants who aren’t happy with immigration may just try to justify their disapproval by blaming them for all the negative behaviors they have. While this may explain some of the phenomenon, it is not enough. There are other possible reasons. Another reason could be that many believe that immigrants are criminals that could have been prevented. This is why there is more attention on them (availability bias), as many people believe that they are easier to prevent than native-born Americans. People could believe that allowing illegal immigrants to commit crimes is a choice that can be easily swept away. This isn’t the way the world works. While this may explain why people think crime rates go up as a result of immigration, it does make the mistake more understandable if the variables are not properly understood.
Another reason is that nativeborn Americans, who are of the same race as recent immigrants, might have a higher rate of incarceration. This is why the survey respondents grouped them together to conclude that immigrants contribute to the rise in crime. Hispanics are more likely to be imprisoned than Asians, but this is not true for nativeborn Americans. This is made worse by the fact Puerto Ricans who aren’t immigrants have the highest rates of incarceration (see Table 1). It would be foolish to blame immigrants for the higher Puerto Rican prisoner rate.
The evidence is mounting that immigrants, irrespective of their legal status are less likely to be convicted than native-born Americans. But, many Americans believe that immigration causes more crime. We can only hope that Americans will respond to the evidence by changing their views so they are in line with current facts.
