Despite substantial public, political, and scholarly attention to the issue of immigration and crime, we know little about the criminological consequences of undocumented immigration. As a result, fundamental questions about whether undocumented immigration increases violent crime remain unanswered. In an attempt to address this gap, we combine newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population with multiple data sources to capture the criminal, socioeconomic, and demographic context of all 50 states and Washington, DC, from 1990 to 2014 to provide the first longitudinal analysis of the macro-level relationship between undocumented immigration and violence. The results from fixed-effects regression models reveal that undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative, although not significant in all specifications. Using supplemental models of victimization data and instrumental variable methods, we find little evidence that these results are due to decreased reporting or selective migration to avoid crime. We consider the theoretical and policy implications of these findings against the backdrop of the dramatic increase in immigration enforcement in recent decades.

This study provides evidence that undocumented immigration has not increased the prevalence of drug or alcohol problems, but may be associated with reductions in these public health concerns.

With empirical research in both sociology of religion and criminology finding conflicting evidence of the directional relationship between religious institutions and delinquency, we test the temporal order of religiosity and delinquency in the early life course. We motivate this research through theories from both subfields, namely, the antiascetic hypothesis from the sociology of religion and social control theory from criminology. We fit cross-lagged panel models to three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the relationship between secular, or mala in se, forms of crime and ascetic, or mala prohibita, forms of crime with the elements of religious social bonds from adolescence through young adulthood. We find support for the antiascetic hypothesis in that religion has effects on mala prohibita behaviors, but not mala in se. Findings regarding bidirectional and reciprocal effects between religion and delinquency encourage extending the antiascetic hypothesis, as well as social control theory, to account for this possibility.