Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Crime

Spenkuch, Jörg L.

doi:10.1093/aler/aht017

Cited by 96 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…In studies that found that crime increased, this increase was mediated not by increases in immigration but by a different variable-such as reduced labor market opportunities or family structure-and differences in incarceration rates due to pre-detention practices and racial profiling (Hagan and Palloni 1999). Spenkuch (2013) finds that immigration is correlated with an increase in financial-related crime, such as theft, but only when increased immigration is coupled with poor labor market opportunities.…”

Section: Empirical Links Between Immigration and Crimementioning

confidence: 97%

Border Residents’ Perceptions of Crime and Security in El Paso, Texas

Castañeda

Chiappetta

2020

Social Sciences

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Research has continued to show the overall safety of the U.S. border region contrary to the widespread belief about the insecurity of the U.S.-Mexico border and frequent claims for the need to secure the border in order to prevent the spread of violence into the rest of the country. Rarely do we ask how border residents feel about safety and crime, which could shed significant light on the claims that the border is an insecure warzone posing a threat to the entire country. While calls to secure national borders are common, outsiders' perceptions of an unsafe border are not supported by official crime rates and statistics, Border Patrol apprehensions, or the everyday experiences of people in American cities along the U.S.-Mexico border. This paper investigates the perception of crime and security, as expressed by the residents of El Paso, Texas, a large city located along the U.S.-Mexico border and directly across from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Data come from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded survey that asked 919 residents about their perceptions of crime, sense of security and safety in their neighborhood and the city in general. The results show that the overwhelming majority of border city residents feel safe and that those who are undocumented and raised in El Paso are the most likely to report feeling safe or very safe. We also find that the foreign-born population had a statistically significant lower felony conviction rate than those who were U.S.-born, an important qualifier in discussions over immigration and its connection with violence and crime. Contrary to sensationalized claims about border violence, residents of El Paso do not display any of the sense of insecurity experienced in neighboring Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. We present hypotheses about possible causes for these low levels of violence in the U.S.-side of the border and discuss the dissonance between the reality on the border and perception outside of the border region.

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Section: Empirical Links Between Immigration and Crimementioning

confidence: 97%

Border Residents’ Perceptions of Crime and Security in El Paso, Texas

Castañeda

Chiappetta

2020

Social Sciences

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“…Thus, the instrument satisfies the condition that it is predictive of variation in undocumented immigration, however, as identified in similar strategies adopted by MacDonald, Hipp, and Gill (2013); Lyons, Vélez, and Santoro (2013); and Spenkuch (2014), the 1980 undocumented population should be theoretically independent of the change in crime rates during this period. As a result, this model breaks the simultaneity between undocumented immigration and crime and provides an exogenous test of the effect of increased undocumented immigration between 1990 and 2014 on changes in violence during this period.…”

Section: Selective Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?*

Light

Miller²

2018

Criminology

128

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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.

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“…Although panel data techniques alleviate this problem by controlling for unobserved time-invariant location characteristics (see, Butcher and Piehl 1998;Ousey and Hubrin 2009;Wadswarth 2010), they do not solve it completely, as there might always be unobserved time-varying features that affect both location decisions and crime rates. Some researchers attempted to deal with this problem by using instrumental variables techniques, trying to find exogenous variations that affect immigrants' choice of location but not unobserved factors that affect crime rates (see, Spenkuch 2013;Bianchi et al 2012;. http://www.izajom.com/content/3/1/12…”

Section: Theoretical Views and A Brief Literature Review On Immigratimentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigration status and property crime: an application of estimators for underreported outcomes

Παπαδόπουλος

2014

IZA J Migration

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This paper studies the individual-level relationship between immigration and property crime in England and Wales using crime self-reports from the Crime and Justice Survey. Models that account for underreporting are used, since this is a major concern in crime self-reports. The results indicate that the reported crime is substantially underreported, but if anything, immigrants are less likely to underreport than natives. More importantly, controlling for underreporting and basic demographics, the estimates across all model specifications, although imprecise, indicate that immigration status and property crime are negatively associated. We finally find that the estimated relationship between immigration status and property crime differs across regions and ethnic groups. JEL Codes: K42, J15, J22, C25, C51

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Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Crime

Cited by 96 publications

References 24 publications

Border Residents’ Perceptions of Crime and Security in El Paso, Texas

Border Residents’ Perceptions of Crime and Security in El Paso, Texas

Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?*

Immigration status and property crime: an application of estimators for underreported outcomes

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