No. Immigrants in the United States, including those without legal status, commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the country. That finding has held across more than 150 years of data, multiple methodologies, and every major sending region, even though public opinion often runs the other way. The question of whether immigrants commit more crime is one of the most studied in American social science, and the answer researchers keep arriving at is consistent.
What the Incarceration Numbers Show
The most comprehensive historical analysis, published in the American Economic Review: Insights in December 2024 by economists Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, and colleagues, used U.S. Census records from 1870 through 2020. Before 1960, immigrants and U.S.-born citizens were incarcerated at roughly equal rates. After 1960, a gap opened and widened.1American Economic Association. Incarceration Immigrants US Born By 2019, U.S.-born men ages 18 to 40 were incarcerated at approximately 3,000 per 100,000. Immigrant men in the same age range were incarcerated at below 1,500 per 100,000.2National Bureau of Economic Research. Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-Born, 1870–2020
Today, immigrants overall are roughly 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than the U.S.-born population, and about 30 percent less likely than white U.S.-born men specifically.3Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Mythical Tie Between Immigration and Crime The pattern held for immigrants from Europe, China, Mexico, and Central America. The researchers attributed the widening gap not to changes in who was arriving but to deteriorating outcomes among less-educated U.S.-born men since the 1960s, including lower labor force participation and higher rates of family disruption.4National Bureau of Economic Research. Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-Born, 1870–2020
What About Undocumented Immigrants
Most law enforcement agencies do not record immigration status, which makes isolating undocumented immigrants harder. Texas is the only state that systematically tracks immigration status for criminal arrests and convictions, so it has become the main testing ground. Georgia and Oklahoma have begun publishing similar data more recently.
A 2020 peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Michael T. Light and colleagues matched Texas Department of Public Safety arrest records from 2012 to 2018 against Department of Homeland Security biometric data. Compared to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens were more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, two and a half times as likely for drug crimes, and more than four times as likely for property crimes.5National Center for Biotechnology Information. Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-Born US Citizens in Texas For robbery, burglary, and arson specifically, native-born citizens were three to five times more likely to be arrested. The study found no evidence that undocumented crime rose during the period examined.6Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-Born US Citizens in Texas
Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute, using 2019 Texas data, found undocumented immigrants were 37 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans; legal immigrants were 57 percent less likely.7Cato Institute. Criminal Immigrants in Texas Those results held under robustness checks accounting for possible undercounts of the undocumented population.
The most recent national estimates come from a Cato Institute analysis published in March 2026 using 2024 American Community Survey data. For people ages 18 to 54, incarceration rates per 100,000 were:
- Native-born Americans: 1,195
- Undocumented immigrants: 674
- Legal immigrants: 303
Undocumented immigrants were about 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans, and legal immigrants were 75 percent less likely.8Cato Institute. Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates 2010–2024 Removing people held in ICE facilities for civil immigration violations rather than criminal offenses dropped the undocumented rate further, to 356 per 100,000.
Does Immigration Raise Community Crime Rates
Individual rates are one question. Whether an inflow of immigrants changes a community’s overall crime level is another. A longitudinal study in Criminology in 2018 examined all 50 states from 1990 through 2014 using FBI Uniform Crime Reports and concluded that undocumented immigration does not increase violence. The relationship between the size of the undocumented population and violent crime was generally negative.9National Center for Biotechnology Information. Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?
Research on sanctuary jurisdictions has reached similar conclusions. A review of four empirical studies found sanctuary counties were either safer than or statistically indistinguishable from non-sanctuary counterparts across violent crime, property crime, homicide, and robbery.10University of North Carolina. Providing Sanctuary or Fostering Crime A 2022 study of more than 3,100 U.S. counties found property and violent crime rates dropped more in sanctuary counties than in non-sanctuary counties after 2014.11University of Texas at Austin. Sanctuary Practices Lower Counties’ Crime Rates
Sociologist Ramiro Martinez of Northeastern University has documented that cities and counties with larger immigrant populations tend to have lower rates of homicide and violence.12American Sociological Association. Sociological Research Reveals How Immigrants Can Reduce Crime A National Institute of Justice report from December 2024 similarly found that increases in the authorized immigrant population were associated with lower rates of drug, property, and violent crime, with no significant association between estimated unauthorized populations and arrest rates.13National Institute of Justice. Research on Immigration and Crime
Does Aggressive Deportation Reduce Crime
A natural follow-up: if a community deports more people, does crime fall? The evidence says no. NYU law professor Adam Cox and University of Chicago law professor Thomas Miles examined the rollout of the Secure Communities program, which screened the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and produced roughly 250,000 detentions across more than 3,000 U.S. counties. They found no meaningful reductions in the FBI index crime rate, including no reductions in homicides, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault.14University of Chicago. Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from Secure Communities
A separate study by Annie Laurie Hines and Giovanni Peri using the same Secure Communities rollout reached the same conclusion: deportation-driven removals did not reduce violent or property crime rates, and the estimates were precise enough to rule out meaningful effects.15IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Immigrants’ Deportations, Local Crime and Police Effectiveness
Why Some Statistics Suggest the Opposite
Two kinds of figures often circulate in the opposite direction and deserve context.
The first is federal sentencing data. In fiscal year 2024, non-U.S. citizens accounted for about 35 percent of everyone sentenced in federal court. But more than 72 percent of those cases were immigration offenses such as illegal entry or re-entry, not violent or property crimes.16U.S. Sentencing Commission. Federally Sentenced Non-US Citizens Set the immigration violations aside and the non-citizen share of the federal system falls substantially.
The second is ICE’s national docket. A September 2024 ICE letter to Congress disclosed that 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories were on the agency’s national docket, including 13,099 with homicide convictions on the non-detained docket.17House Committee on Homeland Security. ICE Response to Representative Tony Gonzales Those figures cover cases accumulated over decades, and many of the individuals listed had already completed their criminal sentences and were awaiting immigration proceedings.
Cato Institute researchers also identified significant data errors in a widely cited Crime Prevention Research Center report by John Lott that claimed undocumented immigrants were disproportionately represented in Arizona’s prison population for serious crimes, arguing Lott had likely added up the wrong numbers.18American Immigration Council. Report on Overcriminalization of Immigrants
Underneath all of this is a data problem. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and the Bureau of Justice Statistics do not systematically record immigration status, so researchers rely on Census and American Community Survey data on the incarcerated population, state records from the few jurisdictions that do track status, or statistical methods that estimate status from demographic characteristics.8Cato Institute. Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates 2010–2024
Why Immigrants Tend to Offend Less
Researchers have offered several explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The immigrant revitalization thesis argues that immigrant communities strengthen neighborhood social fabric through dense family networks, multi-generational households, and community institutions that act as informal checks on criminal behavior.12American Sociological Association. Sociological Research Reveals How Immigrants Can Reduce Crime Research across 9,000 neighborhoods in 87 U.S. cities found the protective effect on neighborhood violence was strongest in cities with sanctuary policies and greater minority representation in government and law enforcement.
A self-selection model developed by economists Fabio Mariani and Marion Mercier argues that the act of migrating selects for people who are more future-oriented and risk-averse, traits associated with lower criminal behavior. Their model suggests immigrants can show lower crime rates than natives even when they have fewer legitimate economic opportunities, and it predicts that stricter immigration policies could produce adverse selection by raising the share of migrants willing to take criminal risks.19IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Immigration and Crime: The Role of Self-Selection and Institutions
Fear of deportation is a third mechanism. Undocumented immigrants in particular have strong incentives to avoid any contact with police. First-generation immigrants have the lowest offending rates, which tend to rise in later generations as children of immigrants assimilate to native-born norms.13National Institute of Justice. Research on Immigration and Crime
Why Public Perception Runs the Other Way
A 2024 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 43 percent of Americans believed immigrants increase crime in local communities, with sharp partisan divides: 73 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of independents, and 17 percent of Democrats. Among people who trust far-right news sources, 84 percent held that view, compared to 29 percent of those who trust mainstream television news.20PRRI. Why the Second Trump Administration Is Making Americans’ Perception of Migrant Crime Central to Its Communications A Gallup poll cited in Cato’s 2026 analysis found 47 percent of Americans thought immigrants increase crime, while only 5 percent thought immigrants reduce it.8Cato Institute. Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates 2010–2024
Attitudes have moved since. By mid-2025, a Gallup survey found a record 79 percent of Americans viewed immigration as a good thing for the country, up from 64 percent the year before, while support for deporting all undocumented immigrants dropped from 47 to 38 percent.21Gallup. Surge in Concern About Immigration Has Abated The research consensus itself has not moved, because it never pointed the other way to begin with.