Politicians often claim there is a relationship between immigration patterns and increased crime. In a recent study done at the University at Buffalo in upstate New York however, no links were found between the two. According to the findings, immigration instead appears to be linked to reductions in some types of crimes.

Robert Adelman, associate professor of sociology at UB and the paper’s lead author, says the results are very clear, and that the data show stable and strong evidence that, on average, immigration and crime are not linked in U.S. metropolitan areas across the country. The study found that immigration does not increase assaults and that serious crimes such as burglaries, larceny, robberies and murder are in fact lower in places where immigration levels are high.

Adelman feels strongly that facts are critical in the current political environment. The empirical evidence in this study and other related research does not support for the view that more immigrants lead to increased crime.

According to Adelman, previous research on the topic has been based on arrest and offense data. That research has showed that, overall, native-born Americans are more likely to commit crimes than are foreign-born individuals.

In this new study, the authors took a step back from looking at individual immigrants to seek to understand whether larger scale immigration patterns in communities could be tied to increased crime because of changes in cities. The changes they looked at included the claim that immigrants displace domestic workers from jobs, and the availability of fewer economic opportunities.

A sample of 200 metropolitan areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, was drawn. The authors then used census data and uniform crime reporting data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1970 to 2010 – a 40-year period.

Adelman explains that this study finds clear evidence across time and place. And while he emphasized that the study does not claim that immigrants are never involved in crime, it does show that communities that undergo demographic changes driven by immigration patterns do not experience a substantial increase in any of the types of crimes examined. The opposite was in fact true – in many cases, crime remained either stable, or actually decreased in communities that assimilated many immigrants.

Adelman also cautions that, because the relationship between immigration and crime is complex, more research needs to be done. This research supports other scholarly conclusions that immigrants have a positive overall effect on American economic and social life.

Adelman feels it important that public policies be based on facts and evidence, rather than ideologies and unfounded claims that vilify certain segments of the U.S. population without any facts to support them.

— This summary was reprinted from Science News Journal, February 15, 2017.

— The full peer reviewed study was published in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice and can be found at this link.