Illegal migrant crime in US
Executive summary
Research across federal datasets and independent scholars shows that immigrants — including those in the country without authorization — are not more likely to commit crime than U.S.-born residents; multiple studies and reviews report lower arrest and incarceration rates for immigrant populations compared with native-born Americans [1] [2] [3]. At the same time, law-enforcement tallies of “criminal aliens” at the border and in federal databases document thousands of convictions and removals each year, and these operational figures drive political and policy debates about public safety [4] [5].
1. Data: two different stories depending on the dataset
Federal enforcement databases list convictions and encounters by noncitizens — CBP’s Criminal Alien Statistics and CBP/ICE enforcement reports catalogue criminal noncitizens and convictions found after border apprehensions — and these numbers are used to show the scale of criminal convictions among people encountered by immigration authorities [4] [5]; however, those federal tallies represent a subset of encounters and often rely on database matches that do not measure population crime rates in the way academic studies do [6].
2. Peer-reviewed and policy research: lower crime rates among immigrants
A growing body of academic and policy research finds that undocumented immigrants are arrested and incarcerated at lower rates than native-born Americans — for example, a National Institute of Justice–funded analysis of Texas arrest records found undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate for property crimes compared with native-born residents [1], and migration-policy and university research similarly conclude immigrants commit crime at lower rates or have no higher rates than U.S.-born populations [2] [3].
3. Why perceptions diverge from the evidence
High-profile incidents, selective federal counts, and local reporting of sheltered migrants can create the impression of a “migrant crime wave” even when broader data do not show it; watchdog analyses and the Brennan Center found no unified trend of rising crime in precincts with large migrant shelters and cautioned that public rhetoric often relies on isolated incidents rather than systematic evidence [7] [6]. Political incentives also shape which statistics are highlighted: enforcement agencies emphasize convictions and removals to justify operations, while researchers emphasize population-rate comparisons to assess public safety impacts [4] [8].
4. Limits and important caveats in the record
All datasets have limitations: CBP and ICE databases count convictions or criminal-history matches among people they encounter, which can overrepresent recently apprehended border crossers or people with foreign convictions, while academic studies that compare crime rates require access to demographic denominators and may be geographically limited (Texas data, state or local studies) or constrained by available immigration-status markers [4] [1] [6]. Estimates of “entries without inspection” and the undetected population are inherently uncertain, complicating attempts to compute exact crime rates among unauthorized migrants [9].
5. Bottom line and policy implications
The weight of empirical research indicates that illegal migrants are not a group that commits crime at higher rates than U.S.-born people and in many studies have lower rates, yet federal enforcement statistics documenting criminal noncitizens remain politically salient and fuel calls for tougher immigration measures [1] [2] [4]. Policymakers and the public should distinguish between operational counts of convicted noncitizens (useful for enforcement planning) and population-level crime rates (essential for assessing public-safety impacts), and be transparent about the limits of each dataset when crafting law-enforcement and immigration policy [5] [6].