GoKawiilGrowing undocumented populations were linked to falling property crime and assaults — but more robberies.Credit: John Moore/Getty
Neighbourhoods across the United States that experienced a growth in their undocumented population also saw property-related and violent crime fall, not rise, according to an analysis of 11,500 neighbourhoods in more than 100 cities.
In a paper published in the Journal of Urban Affairs on 10 August1, researchers combined estimates of numbers of undocumented residents with crime statistics from between 2010 and 2018.
“Our study is the first to analyse these numbers across neighbourhoods and using such a diverse national sample,” says co-author Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine. “That’s important because neighbourhoods are very proximate spaces to people. That’s where perceptions form.”
Earlier studies “have used samples of people or places in a specific jurisdiction”, says Alexis Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, but the new work has “a much larger reach”.
The findings support previous research that found no link between immigration and violent crime in the United States and elsewhere. “That very much fits the picture that we’ve seen in UK studies,” says Ben Brindle, a senior researcher with the Migration Observatory project at the University of Oxford, UK.
In the neighbourhood
Undocumented immigrants include people who entered the country illegally or who reside there on an expired visa. The public perception of them is often fuelled by the belief that they are more likely to commit crimes than are documented immigrants or citizens.
But, Piquero notes, “it’s very hard to measure the number of undocumented immigrants in any country because they’re undocumented. So, researchers have come up with estimates.”
In the current study, Kubrin and her colleagues were granted access to non-public demographic data for 46 million people through a US federal statistical research data center.
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