The charge is as old as American immigration itself: the newcomers bring crime. It was aimed at the Irish, the Italians, and the Chinese, and today it is aimed at migrants from Latin America. It is also one of the most carefully studied claims in American social science, which means we do not have to argue it from feeling. We can read the record.
What the government's own study found
Start with the Justice Department, not an advocacy group. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, funded a study that used Texas arrest records from 2012 to 2018, records that uniquely flag immigration status, to measure who actually gets arrested. [1] The finding: undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent crimes and for drug crimes, and about a quarter the rate for property crimes. [1] Turned around, native-born citizens were more than twice as likely to be arrested for a violent crime, two and a half times as likely for a drug crime, and over four times as likely for a property crime as undocumented immigrants. [1][2]
Data
| Property crime | 4x |
|---|---|
| Drug crime | 2.5x |
| Violent crime | 2x |
It is not new, either
This is not a quirk of one state or one decade. Economists examining U.S. census and survey records back to 1870 found that immigrants have been incarcerated at lower rates than the US-born across the entire 150-year span, and that since the 1960s the gap has widened. [3] Today, immigrants are roughly 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than US-born citizens. [3] A century and a half of American data has been asked the same question, in boom and bust, under open immigration and closed, and it keeps returning the same answer.
Why the myth outlives the math
A fact this well-established does not survive by accident. It survives because it is useful, and because of how attention works. A single terrible crime committed by an immigrant is national news for a week; the far larger number of crimes never committed never makes the page. The cost of the myth is not paid by statistics. It is paid by the citizen asked for papers, the family split by a raid built on a false premise, the worker afraid to call the police. The record is clear, and people are owed the truth that is in it.
