No evidence that immigration has increased crime across US states over the last decade

Summary

No. Across the last ten years for which both crime and population data are available (2013-2022), there is no evidence that immigration made crime worse across US states. The peer-reviewed literature is close to consensus that immigrants - including undocumented immigrants - are arrested and incarcerated at lower rates than the US-born, and a 51-state, 10-year fixed-effects panel built from FBI and Census data in this analysis finds no statistically significant relationship between a state's foreign-born population share and its violent-crime rate, with the point estimate leaning slightly negative rather than positive.

Step 1 - What the research literature says

Multiple independent research designs, spanning different data sources, time periods, and methods, converge on the same finding:

• Texas administrative arrest records, 2012-2018 (Michael T. Light, NIJ-funded study, published via the National Institute of Justice): using a unique Texas requirement that arrest records include DHS-verified immigration status, undocumented immigrants had a violent-crime arrest rate of 96.2 per 100,000 versus 213 per 100,000 for US-born citizens - less than half. Drug-crime arrests were also less than half the US-born rate (135 vs 337.2 per 100,000), property crime about a quarter (38.5 vs 165.2 per 100,000), and homicide arrests less than half (1.9 vs 4.8 per 100,000). A formal test found no evidence the undocumented share of crime grew over the seven-year window.
• 150 years of US Census data, 1870-2020 (Abramitzky, Boustan, Jacome, Perez, Torres; NBER working paper w31440, subsequently at American Economic Review: Insights): immigrants have never, in any decade since 1870, been incarcerated at a higher rate than the US-born. Since 1960 the gap has widened; as of the most recent data immigrants are about 60% less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born (30% less likely versus US-born whites specifically).
• 11,500 neighborhoods, over 100 cities, 2010-2018 (Kubrin, Christopher, Hodgen, Luo & Hipp, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2026, using restricted-access Census Bureau microdata for 46 million people): growth in a neighborhood's undocumented population was associated with falling property crime and aggravated assault, not rising crime. One exception - robberies rose somewhat with undocumented population growth - which the authors attribute to undocumented immigrants' greater likelihood of being crime victims (more likely to be paid in cash, less likely to bank), not necessarily offenders.
• State-level correlation, 2017-2022, all 50 states (American Immigration Council, using FBI UCR and Census Bureau data, beta regression): no statistically significant relationship between a state's immigrant population share and its total crime rate. Separately, from 1980 to 2022 the immigrant population share more than doubled nationally (6.2% to 13.9%) while the total crime rate fell 60.4%.

The dissenting voice in this literature is the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which has published estimates of comparatively high illegal-immigrant crime rates in Texas. That work has been criticized in detail by the Cato Institute and the American Immigration Council for methodological problems, including double-counting some illegal-immigrant murderers and using an illegal-immigrant population estimate inconsistent with CIS's own other estimates (which mechanically inflates the computed rate). CIS's findings have not been replicated in the peer-reviewed studies above.

Step 2 - An independent check against AskAmerica's own state-panel data

To test the literature's finding directly rather than only relay it, this analysis built a state-year panel joining FBI Crime Data Explorer violent-crime rates (crime.cde_offenses) to Census ACS foreign-born population shares (census.acs_nativity) for all 50 states plus DC, 2013-2022 - the most recent 10-year window where both series are loaded and not still mid-backfill (ACS nativity data lags about two years, so 2024-2025 do not yet exist upstream; FBI data itself is loaded through 2026).

Two-way fixed-effects panel regression (state and year effects absorbed, so the estimate reflects within-state change over time, net of any nationwide year-to-year shock): a 1 percentage-point rise in a state's foreign-born share is associated with a change of -11.1 violent crimes per 100,000 (SE 11.0, p=0.31, n=510) - negative in direction but not statistically distinguishable from zero.

Reporting-coverage check: FBI's collection went through an SRS-to-NIBRS reporting transition around 2018-2021, and average state agency reporting coverage fell as low as 26% in one state in 2021. Restricting the panel to state-years with at least 80% reporting coverage (dropping 33 of 510 state-years) shrinks the coefficient to -2.6 per 100,000 (SE 5.4, p=0.63, n=477) - still negative, still not significant. The direction of the finding is unchanged by this exclusion.

Naive (no fixed-effects) cross-state comparison, for contrast: pooling all state-years without controlling for state or year gives a weakly positive coefficient (+2.1 per 100,000, p=0.11) - illustrating exactly the confound the fixed-effects model is designed to remove (states with more immigrants differ systematically in ways, like urbanization, that also affect crime levels). Leave-one-state-out testing shows this naive estimate is fragile: dropping any single one of six states (NJ, LA, TN, AR, HI, CT) flips its statistical significance, and the coefficient itself ranges from 0.40 to 3.46 depending on which state is excluded - the opposite of a robust, broad-based pattern.

Both the properly specified (fixed-effects) estimate and the literature agree: there is no evidence of a positive relationship between immigration and crime at state grain over this decade. The fixed-effects point estimate leans negative, consistent with several of the studies above, though this analysis's own estimate is not itself statistically significant and should not be over-read as proof immigration reduces crime - only that raising the immigrant share is not associated with rising crime.

Caveats

• This is an observational, associational analysis, not a causal identification design; no controls for poverty, urbanization, policing intensity, or age structure are included, any of which could confound the raw relationship in either direction.
• State grain (n=51) is coarse; the strongest recent quasi-experimental/administrative-data work (Texas arrest records, neighborhood-level analysis) reaches much finer grain and is more informative about mechanism than this state panel.
• FBI crime data quality varies by state and year due to the SRS-to-NIBRS transition; this was tested directly above and did not change the conclusion.
• "Immigration" as a category conflates legal and undocumented immigration; most literature above examines them separately when possible (the Texas study and neighborhood study do; the panel built here uses total foreign-born share, which does not distinguish status).