How do crime rates compare between undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens in 2025?

1. The headline: what recent empirical work finds

Large, cited analyses repeatedly find undocumented immigrants do not increase crime and generally have lower offending and incarceration rates than U.S.-born citizens. The NIJ-funded Texas study reported undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates for total felony and violent felony crimes and were arrested at under half the rate for violent and drug offenses and one-quarter the rate for property crimes compared with native-born citizens ^{[1] [5]}. Broader historical work and syntheses — including analyses of incarceration over 150 years and multi-state datasets — show immigrants as a group are less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people, especially in recent decades ^{[3] [6]}.

2. Why Texas data is relied on — strengths and limits

Researchers often cite Texas because it uniquely records arrests and convictions by immigration status, letting analysts directly compare undocumented, documented, and U.S.-born populations ^{[4] [5]}. That direct linkage is a strength: the Texas study’s findings were robust across offense types and alternative definitions ^[5]. But relying on one state means national generalization requires caution: demographic mix, enforcement priorities, and local policing patterns vary across states, and researchers note the challenge of estimating undocumented population sizes broadly ^{[7] [8]}.

3. Consistency across independent research and policy groups

Academic papers, think tanks, and advocacy organizations converge on the basic pattern: immigration is not correlated with higher crime and, in many analyses, higher immigrant concentration correlates with lower crime rates ^{[2] [9] [10] [11]}. The Migration Policy Institute summarized that U.S.-born citizens were far more likely to be incarcerated for weapons, violent, property and drug offenses than immigrants ^[4]. The Brennan Center and sociological reviews similarly state that undocumented immigration does not raise violent crime ^{[11] [12]}.

4. Conflicting findings and areas of debate

Not all studies are identical in detail. Some older or narrowly focused research finds mixed results for specific crimes or subgroups — for example, certain analyses have flagged localized associations between unauthorized immigration from particular origins and specific types of violence ^[9]. Wikipedia’s summary notes debates and contested findings internationally and highlights one 2025 analysis outside the U.S. context that reported higher arrest rates for some non‑citizen groups in the UK ^[13]. These outliers underscore that results can differ by place, time period, and data source.

5. How enforcement data (CBP, Border Patrol) fits into the picture

Enforcement statistics such as Customs and Border Protection’s Criminal Alien Statistics enumerate convictions and prior convictions discovered after apprehension, but they capture a selected population (those encountered by federal enforcement) and do not measure population crime rates per capita the same way state criminal history datasets do ^{[14] [15]}. Some aggregations of enforcement counts in 2025 report thousands of “criminal alien” arrests through midyear, but these figures reflect enforcement priorities and record-matching processes rather than a direct comparison of offending rates between population groups ^{[15] [14]}.

6. Explanations researchers offer for lower rates among immigrants

Scholars propose multiple, non‑exclusive explanations: selection effects (immigrants who migrate may have lower propensities for crime), strong family and community social ties, economic incentives to avoid detection, and compositional shifts in U.S.-born populations that raise their incarceration rates relative to immigrants ^{[16] [17] [5]}. Policy scholars also caution that deportation and intense enforcement can have unintended effects on community cohesion and crime patterns ^[7].

7. What reporting gaps remain and how to read claims about a “migrant crime wave”

Available sources show a strong consensus in peer‑reviewed work and policy analyses that undocumented immigrants do not increase crime and often have lower arrest/incarceration rates ^{[1] [2] [11]}. However, available sources do not provide a single, nationwide 2025 per‑capita crime rate comparison calculated from uniformly collected national criminal-history data by immigration status; researchers rely on state datasets (notably Texas) and on synthesis of multiple studies ^{[7] [4]}. Policymakers and journalists should therefore weigh direct-state evidence, federal enforcement counts, and peer-reviewed syntheses together and note how different data sources select different populations ^{[5] [14]}.

Bottom line: The best-available, cited empirical work through 2025 indicates undocumented immigrants are generally arrested and incarcerated at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, but national generalization depends on data sources and context; contested, locality-specific findings exist and should be examined case by case ^{[1] [4] [9]}.