Relationship Between Immigration And Crime
Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime / 457
Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime
Kristin F. Butcher
Anne Morrison Piehl
Abstract
Public concerns about the costs of immigration and crime are high, and sometimes overlapping. This article investigates the relationship between immigration into a metropolitan area and that area’s crime rate during the 1980s.
Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. …show more content…
460 / Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime immigration is a geographically concentrated phenomenon and use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to compare crime in immigrant-intensive cities to other cities. This comparison demonstrates whether immigrants themselves appear to be disproportionately likely to commit crimes and whether they appear to cause native-born people to engage in criminal activity. Because the two effects cannot be separately identified using this strategy, we also use data on individuals from the 1980
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to see whether immigrants are more likely to report criminal activity than natives, in the raw means and controlling for their characteristics.
Although we find that the flow of recent immigrants is positively correlated with the level of crime, it has no effect on one-year changes in the crime rate.
This result holds whether or not we control for changes in other city-level variables, such as demographics or labor market indicators. To the extent that we can test it with our data, it does not appear that immigrants assimilate …show more content…
These crimes are referred to as “index” offenses. The first four crimes are categorized as violent crimes; the others are property crimes. Crime rates are reported as index crimes per 100,000 in population [U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1988]. The most common property crimes are larceny and theft, which make up 63 percent of the offenses. Burglaries are 24 percent of property crimes. Among violent crimes, aggravated assaults constitute 60 percent of the offenses and robbery 35 percent.
Using the UCR may cause us to overlook some important types of crime. For example, drug dealing, simple assaults, fraud, vandalism, and weapons violations are not included in the UCR measure of index crimes. If some of these crimes are disproportionately committed by immigrants, then our analysis of the relationship between fraction immigrant in a city and the index crime rate will not pick up the total effect of immigrant inflows on criminal
Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime
Kristin F. Butcher
Anne Morrison Piehl
Abstract
Public concerns about the costs of immigration and crime are high, and sometimes overlapping. This article investigates the relationship between immigration into a metropolitan area and that area’s crime rate during the 1980s.
Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. …show more content…
460 / Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime immigration is a geographically concentrated phenomenon and use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to compare crime in immigrant-intensive cities to other cities. This comparison demonstrates whether immigrants themselves appear to be disproportionately likely to commit crimes and whether they appear to cause native-born people to engage in criminal activity. Because the two effects cannot be separately identified using this strategy, we also use data on individuals from the 1980
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to see whether immigrants are more likely to report criminal activity than natives, in the raw means and controlling for their characteristics.
Although we find that the flow of recent immigrants is positively correlated with the level of crime, it has no effect on one-year changes in the crime rate.
This result holds whether or not we control for changes in other city-level variables, such as demographics or labor market indicators. To the extent that we can test it with our data, it does not appear that immigrants assimilate …show more content…
These crimes are referred to as “index” offenses. The first four crimes are categorized as violent crimes; the others are property crimes. Crime rates are reported as index crimes per 100,000 in population [U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1988]. The most common property crimes are larceny and theft, which make up 63 percent of the offenses. Burglaries are 24 percent of property crimes. Among violent crimes, aggravated assaults constitute 60 percent of the offenses and robbery 35 percent.
Using the UCR may cause us to overlook some important types of crime. For example, drug dealing, simple assaults, fraud, vandalism, and weapons violations are not included in the UCR measure of index crimes. If some of these crimes are disproportionately committed by immigrants, then our analysis of the relationship between fraction immigrant in a city and the index crime rate will not pick up the total effect of immigrant inflows on criminal