How do conviction rates for immigrants compare to arrest rates across U.S. states?
Executive summary
Across the available, peer‑reviewed research and official compilations, immigrants—including unauthorized immigrants—are arrested and convicted at lower rates than U.S.-born people where researchers can measure both, but national comparisons are hampered because almost no states systematically record immigration status on arrest and conviction records; Texas is the single state that provides the clearest apples‑to‑apples evidence [1] [2] [3]. National and historical studies similarly find lower incarceration or conviction rates for immigrants overall, but policymakers and enforcement agencies often publish counts that are not directly comparable to population‑based arrest or conviction rates [4] [5] [6].
1. Texas: the one state that lets researchers compare arrests and convictions by immigration status, and what it shows
Texas criminal records uniquely include immigration status at arrest, and analyses using those data find that undocumented immigrants are arrested at substantially lower rates than native‑born citizens—less than half the rate for violent and drug crimes and about one‑quarter the rate for property crimes—and those differences hold when researchers substitute convictions for arrests as the measure (NIJ summary of the Texas study; [2]; PNAS replication and robustness checks; [7]; OJP summary; p1_s6).
2. National and historical evidence: incarceration and conviction gaps favor immigrants
Multiple national and long‑run studies show immigrants are incarcerated and convicted at lower rates than the U.S.‑born; a 150‑year historical analysis and NBER working papers report that immigrants today are markedly less likely to be incarcerated than native‑born people, and cross‑national research similarly finds no positive correlation between rising immigrant shares and higher crime rates (Northwestern summary; [9]; NBER working paper; [4]; American Immigration Council’s state‑level analysis; p1_s8).
3. Arrest rates versus conviction rates: why the distinction matters and what the literature finds
Arrests are a raw input subject to enforcement discretion, reporting practices, and local policies; convictions are downstream and reflect prosecutorial charging, plea bargaining, and judicial outcomes—Texas research and PNAS analyses report that the immigrant gap persists whether measuring arrests or convictions, indicating that lower arrest rates are not solely an artifact of policing but extend to convictions as well (PNAS; [7]; OJP; p1_s6).
4. Official enforcement tallies and political framing can obscure the rate story
Agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection release counts of “criminal aliens” and convictions discovered by record checks around interdiction—figures that enumerate convictions but do not normalize by population, making them ill‑suited to compare per‑capita risk between immigrants and natives (CBP Criminal Alien Statistics; p1_s5). Political narratives and headline arrests amplify raw counts and high‑profile cases, even though peer‑reviewed, population‑normalized research repeatedly finds lower arrest and conviction rates among immigrant groups (congressional hearing summary and USA Today reporting on public perception; [1]0).
5. Limitations, open questions, and why state‑level variation is hard to measure
Because nearly all states do not record immigration status systematically in arrest and conviction databases, researchers must rely on a patchwork of state exceptions (Texas), academic estimation methods, and historical records to infer national patterns—this limits the ability to map conviction‑to‑arrest ratios by immigration status across individual states, and means national conclusions rest on rigorous studies that extrapolate from available data rather than comprehensive state‑by‑state registries (migrationpolicy.org explainer; [1]; PNAS caveats; p1_s4).
6. Bottom line and competing perspectives
The rigorous empirical literature and the unique Texas records converge on a clear bottom line: immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are arrested and convicted at lower rates than the U.S.‑born where comparison is possible, and this gap remains when using convictions rather than arrests—yet official enforcement tallies and political rhetoric often present raw counts that can mislead the public, and the lack of uniform state tracking prevents a fully granular, state‑by‑state accounting [2] [7] [5] [6]. Alternative viewpoints emphasize public safety concerns tied to particular criminal incidents and agency tallies; those are legitimate points of public debate but do not overturn the population‑normalized findings in the peer‑reviewed and government‑sponsored studies cited above [8] [6].