There is a particular kind of fatigue that sets in when you have been reading the literature on a question for decades and the political class continues to conduct itself as though the literature does not exist. I confess to feeling it now.
Charis Kubrin, Chancellor’s Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine, and a team spanning Stanford, Akron, and UCI have just published in the Journal of Urban Affairs the most geographically granular study ever conducted on unauthorized immigration and neighborhood crime. They tracked 11,500 neighborhoods, home to 46 million residents, across diverse U.S. cities from 2010 to 2018. To estimate undocumented populations at the census-tract level, they accessed restricted individual-level Census data through a federal Research Data Center and applied imputation methods similar to those used by the Department of Homeland Security. This is not a survey of attitudes. This is not a press release dressed up as research. It is painstaking, methodologically rigorous, and entirely destructive of the central justification for American immigration enforcement policy.
The findings are unambiguous. Neighborhoods where the undocumented share grew saw greater reductions in property crime. Violent crime showed no significant change. Aggravated assaults declined. One category, robbery, ticked upward, and the research team’s interpretation is worth pausing on: undocumented residents, disproportionately reliant on the cash economy, carrying earnings they cannot bank, reluctant to report crimes to police for fear of deportation, become what prior neighborhood-level studies have called a “Walking ATM.” The evidence points toward victimization, not perpetration. The study cannot confirm this definitively, since crime data do not record victims’ immigration status, but the pattern across every other crime category makes it the most plausible reading.
Here is the part that should make any honest person sit quietly for a moment. Kubrin notes that the Wickersham Commission reached the same conclusion, that immigrants are less involved in crime than the native-born, nearly a century ago. It made the front page of the New York Times. The headline read, “Wickersham Board Frees Foreign-Born of Big Crime Blame.” That was 1931. The finding has been replicated, refined, and reconfirmed across decades and methodologies. A 2017 meta-analysis by Ousey and Kubrin surveyed 51 macro-level immigration-crime studies conducted between 1994 and 2014. Not one had explicitly examined unauthorized immigration flows. Green’s 2016 longitudinal study, published in the same PMC-indexed literature, found that undocumented immigration does not increase violent crime and that the relationship is generally negative. The new Kubrin study extends this to the neighborhood level, the scale at which people actually live and form their fears, and the answer does not change.
And yet the federal government spends more on immigration enforcement agencies than on all other principal federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined. The primary justification cited for this expenditure is public safety. There is no evidence to support that justification. There is, and has been for generations, considerable evidence against it.
Kubrin, who recently accepted the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the field’s highest honor, puts the matter plainly. These policies are largely ineffective at enhancing public safety and may do more harm than good. They target low-level offenders rather than serious criminals. They corrode trust between immigrant communities and police, suppressing crime reporting. They inflict psychological trauma on U.S.-born children whose parents are deported. A separate UCI study led by T. William Lester found that Orange County businesses lost nearly $59 million in economic output over just eight weeks of intensified federal enforcement.
The architecture of American immigration enforcement is not built on a misunderstanding. It is built on a refusal to read.