What percentage of crime do undocumented people in america hold
Executive summary
Multiple major research syntheses and policy centers find that immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — commit crimes at equal or lower rates than U.S.-born residents, but there is no authoritative, nationally representative statistic that states “undocumented people commit X% of all crime in the U.S.” because the data needed to produce that precise percentage do not exist in the public record [1] [2] [3].
1. What the research consensus actually reports
A growing body of empirical work assembled by organizations such as the Migration Policy Institute, the American Immigration Council and academic studies finds that immigrants overall, and undocumented immigrants in particular, have lower arrest and incarceration rates than U.S.-born people; these organizations report that immigration is not associated with higher violent crime and in many places correlates with lower crime rates [1] [2] [4].
2. There is no reliable national “share of crime” number for undocumented people
Federal and local criminal justice datasets do not consistently record legal status in a way that permits calculating a national share of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, and the principal enforcement compilations (for example, Customs and Border Protection’s “criminal alien” counts) are summaries of enforcement encounters and conviction histories, not a comprehensive accounting of all crimes in the United States attributable to people by immigration status [5].
3. Why producing a single percentage is methodologically fraught
Estimating a percent share would require simultaneously accurate denominators (the undocumented population size) and numerators (the number of crimes committed by people who were undocumented at the time); researchers highlight that unauthorized population estimates are imprecise and that crime datasets seldom identify immigration status, which forces scholars to rely on indirect methods, local-area proxies, or arrest/incarceration comparisons rather than a direct national proportion [6] [7].
4. The best available comparative metrics point toward lower offending rates, not a large share of crime
Multiple studies summarized by the Brennan Center, Migration Policy Institute, and the American Immigration Council report that undocumented immigrants are arrested and incarcerated at lower rates than the U.S.-born — one widely cited estimate found undocumented immigrants were about 33% less likely to be incarcerated than the U.S.-born, and other work finds immigrants overall are substantially less likely to be incarcerated than native-born citizens [3] [4] [8]. Peer-reviewed longitudinal analyses also conclude that increases in unauthorized immigration are generally not associated with increases in violent crime at the state level [6].
5. What enforcement data tell — and what they do not
Enforcement agencies publish “criminal alien” statistics that document convictions found in law‑enforcement checks after apprehension, but those datasets reflect CBP and ICE operational encounters and historical convictions rather than a population‑based crime share; using those numbers to infer the percentage of national crime attributable to undocumented people risks conflating enforcement focus with prevalence [5].
6. Political narratives versus empirical findings
High-profile individual crimes by undocumented people receive intense media and political attention, which can create the perception of a “migrant crime wave,” but multiple research syntheses warn that sensational cases are not evidence of a broad upward trend and that sanctuary policies or immigrant concentrations have not been shown to raise crime rates [3] [1]. Reporters and advocates on different sides have clear incentives — political actors may emphasize isolated incidents to justify enforcement actions, while immigrant‑rights groups emphasize aggregate studies that show lower rates of offending [3] [4].
7. Bottom line for the question asked
There is no authoritative, evidence‑based single percentage that expresses “what percentage of crime undocumented people in America hold” because the data infrastructure does not support that precise calculation; contemporary, peer‑reviewed research and major policy organizations consistently find that undocumented immigrants do not drive higher crime rates and, by multiple comparative measures, offend at lower rates than the U.S.‑born [6] [2] [1].