Immigration and crime
The relationship between immigration and crime has been a subject of extensive research, political discourse, and public debate.
Immigrants are disproportionately represented in prison populations in many Western countries, though notable exceptions exist, such as the United States. In Europe and other regions, higher representation in prisons among immigrants, particularly Muslim populations, has been documented. However, some of the factors contributing to these trends include imprisonment for migration-related offenses and systemic bias in policing and judicial processes, which may inflate crime statistics for immigrant populations relative to their real criminal rate. Research suggests that public perception often exaggerates the connection between immigration and crime, influenced by sensationalised media coverage and political rhetoric. This can result in stricter immigration controls, as well as harsher immigration policies like family separation; along with a potential increase in hate crimes against immigrant communities.
Factors
Research relating to immigration and crime has been described as generally showing mixed results.While immigrants are overrepresented in prison populations in many Western countries, with notable exceptions such as the United States, some studies fail to show a causal effect of immigration on overall crime rates. Other studies have found that immigration increases crime under certain circumstances, such as if immigrants have poor prospects in the labor market or labor restrictions.
Some factors may affect the reliability of data on suspect rates, crime rates, conviction rates and prison populations for drawing conclusions about immigrants' overall involvement in criminal activity:
- Police practices, such as racial profiling, over-policing in areas populated by immigrants or in-group bias may result in disproportionately high numbers of immigrants among crime suspects.
- Possible discrimination by the judicial system may result in higher number of convictions.
- Unfavorable bail and sentencing decisions due to foreigners' ease of flight, lack of domiciles, lack of regular employment and lack of family able to host the individual can explain immigrants' higher incarceration rates when compared to their share of convictions relative to the native population.
- Non-immigrants may be more likely to report crimes when they believe the offender has an immigrant background.
- Imprisonment for migration offenses, which are more common among immigrants without a residence permit in their host country, would need to be excluded from the analysis of crime statistics for meaningful comparisons between overall immigrant and native criminal involvement.
- Foreigners imprisoned for drug offenses may not actually live in the country where they are serving sentences but were arrested while in transit.
- Crimes by short-term migrants, such as tourists, exchange students and transient workers, are in some cases counted as crimes by immigrants or foreigners, and gives the impression that a higher share of the migrant population commits crimes.
- Some immigrants might disproportionately locate in deprived areas where crime is higher or because they tend to locate in areas where there is a large population of residents of the same ethnic background. Some research suggests that the allocation of refugee immigrants to high crime neighborhoods increases individual crime propensity later in life due to social interaction with criminals.
- Granting legal to undocumented immigrants might reduce crime rates among that population due to factors like greater job market opportunities for the legal immigrants. Some scholars suggested the relationship between crime and the legal status of immigrants was understudied.
- Demographic characteristics like being young, male, and poorly-educated can increase the likelihood of imprisonment among immigrants.
- Immigrants could become substitutes for natives in crime markets, resulting in no change to the overall amount of crime taking place.
- "Irregular aliens would be counted in the share of immigrants in the prison population, but not in the share of immigrants in the resident population."
Trends
According to a 2024 article migrants in 30 countries, many have higher share of prison populations compared to native-born populations. Among immigrants, younger and less-educated men, as well as those with undocumented or irregular legal status, have a higher propensity to commit crimes compared to those with documented status.
Terrorism
As of 2020, the relationship between immigration and terrorism was inconclusive. A 2016 study finds that migrants from terror-prone states increase the risk of terrorism in the host country, but when immigration is not necessarily linked to terrorism in the migrants' countries of origin, immigration is associated with a lower level of terrorism in the host country. The authors note that "only a minority of migrants from high-terrorism states can be associated with increases in terrorism, and not necessarily in a direct way."A paper by a group of German political scientists and economists, covering 1980–2010, found that on average, the foreigners were not more likely to become terrorists than the natives. The study also found little evidence that terrorism is systematically imported from predominantly Muslim countries, the exceptions being Algeria and Iran. High-skilled migrants are associated with a significantly lower risk of terror compared to low-skilled ones, while there is no significant difference between male and female migrants. The study found a risk trade-off: increased immigration laws could decrease the influx of migrants and therefore the potential number of future terrorist attacks, but diminished acceptance by the host country of the migrants increased the terror risk of those already in the country. Research focusing on the security impact of the European migrant crisis found little to no relationship between increasing migration flows and acts of terrorism.
According to Olivier Roy in 2017 analyzing the previous two decades of terrorism in France, the typical jihadist is a second-generation immigrant or convert who after a period of petty crime was radicalized in prison. Georgetown University terrorism expert Daniel Byman agree with Olivier Roy that repression of minority groups, such as Muslims, makes it easier for terrorist organizations to recruit from those minority groups. Roy has argued that the burkini bans and secularist policies of France provoked religious violence in France, which French scholar Gilles Kepel disputed saying that Britain did not have those policies and still suffered several jihadist attacks in 2017.
Although Swedish police do not record or release the ethnicity of convicted criminals, there has been a major increase in the number of bombing incidents in recent years. Linda H Staaf, head of intelligence at National Operations Department, says that the perpetrators are from poor areas and many are second- or third-generation immigrants. During the month of January, there has been an average of one blast per day.
Perception
Research suggests that people overestimate the relationship between immigration and criminality. Two 2023 studies, one of Switzerland and one of Chile, have documented how a rise in immigration leads to a rise in fears about immigrant crime without any corresponding rise in crime, with authors of both studies suggesting that media competition led to the overemphasis of immigrant crime narratives and perceptions.A January 2024 survey in the U.S. found that 57% of Americans believe migrants lead to more crime, which some experts attribute to anecdotal media stories that lack context. Graham Ousey believes the perception stems from flashpoint events that politicians use to push up the myth that immigrants create more crime. Donald Trump has been the most prominent promoter of the false link between immigration and crime, according to the Associated Press. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera argues it is a cornerstone of the MAGA platform.
A 2016 study of Belgium found that living in an ethnically diverse community led to a greater fear of crime, unrelated to the actual crime statistics. A 2015 study found that the increase in immigration flows into western European countries that took place in the 2000s did "not affect crime victimization, but it is associated with an increase in the fear of crime, the latter being consistently and positively correlated with the natives' unfavourable attitude toward immigrants." Americans dramatically overestimate the relationship between refugees and terrorism. A 2018 study found that media coverage of immigrants in the United States has a general tendency to emphasize illegality and/or criminal behavior in a way that is inconsistent with actual immigrant demographics. A study of coverage of refugees in the Guardian and the Times in the UK from 2015 to 2018 found that media portrayals made Muslim refugees seem like threats to the economy or security and exaggerated differences between these refugees and the native population.
The Economist reported in 2018 that some right-wing parties make claims about a connection between immigration and crime, even though the issues are mostly unrelated.
Politics
Research suggests that the perception that there is a positive causal link between immigration and crime leads to greater support for anti-immigration policies or parties. Research also suggests a vicious cycle of bigotry and immigrant alienation could exacerbate immigrant criminality and bigotry. For instance, UC San Diego political scientist Claire Adida, Stanford University political scientist David Laitin, and Sorbonne University economist Marie-Anne Valfort argue:ear-based policies that target groups of people according to their religion or region of origin are counter-productive. Our own research, which explains the failed integration of Muslim immigrants in France, suggests that such policies can feed into a vicious cycle that damages national security. French Islamophobia—a response to cultural difference—has encouraged Muslim immigrants to withdraw from French society, which then feeds back into French Islamophobia, thus further exacerbating Muslims' alienation, and so on. Indeed, the failure of French security in 2015 was likely due to police tactics that intimidated rather than welcomed the children of immigrants—an approach that makes it hard to obtain crucial information from community members about potential threats.A study of the long-run effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks found that the post-9/11 increase in hate crimes against Muslims decreased assimilation by Muslim immigrants. Controlling for relevant factors, the authors found that "Muslim immigrants living in states with the sharpest increase in hate crimes also exhibit: greater chances of marrying within their own ethnic group; higher fertility; lower female labour force participation; and lower English proficiency." Hate crimes and family separation have also been consequences of rhetoric linking crime to migration from Mexico.
States that experience terrorist acts on their own soil or against their own citizens are more likely to adopt stricter restrictions on asylum recognition. Individuals who believe that African Americans and Hispanics are more prone to violence are more likely to support capital punishment. The Dillingham Commission singled out immigrants from Southern Europe for their involvement in violent crime. The commission's overall findings provided the rationale for sweeping 1920s immigration-reduction acts, including the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which favored immigration from northern and western Europe by restricting the annual number of immigrants from any given country to 3 percent of the total number of people from that country living in the United States in 1910. The movement for immigration restriction that the Dillingham Commission helped to stimulate culminated in the National Origins Formula, part of the Immigration Act of 1924, which capped national immigration at 150,000 annually and completely barred immigration from Asia.