Alex Nowrasteh and Krit Chanwong
Cato scholars have published many groundbreaking studies on immigration and crime. From the first nationwide estimates of illegal immigrant incarceration rates to uncovering data on illegal immigrant criminal convictions and arrests in Texas and researching drunk driving, espionage, mass shootings, victimization rates, crime reporting, politically motivated violence, and terrorism, we’ve been at the forefront of immigration and crime research. Immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans.
Another way to gauge immigrant criminality is to see whether they are more likely to have been incarcerated over the course of their lives. To accomplish this, we broadly emulated the methods from a 2023 paper on declining American incarceration rates by Jason P. Robey, Michael Massoglia, and Michael T. Light. We pulled annual cross-section data from the American Community Survey (ACS) one-year microdata from 2006 to 2023. We specifically measured the cumulative rate of incarceration for all individuals in each of those years who were born in 1990 by race, ethnicity, and immigration status (identified using the residual method).
Figure 1 plots the incarceration risk for individuals born in 1990 by immigration status. For the 1990 cohort, native-born Americans were 267 percent more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants by age 33. Eleven percent of native-born Americans in that year-born cohort have been incarcerated compared to just three percent of immigrants. Other countries really are sending their best.
Figure 2 breaks down the incarceration risks for immigrants and native-born Americans who are Asian, Hispanic, black, and white. Immigrants born in 1990 had a significantly lower incarceration risk than native-born Americans for all races and ethnicities born in the same year. Hispanic, Asian, black, and white immigrants each have a lower incarceration rate than white native-born Americans. Asian illegal immigrants have the lowest incarceration risks at around 0.08 percent.
Table 1 breaks down incarceration risks by Census region. Immigrants also have lower incarceration rates throughout the United States. The differences are especially noticeable in the South, where the native-born incarceration rate is almost ten times higher than that of legal immigrants and almost two times higher than that of illegal immigrants.
Not only do these trends hold across different races, ethnicities, and regions of the United States, but they also hold over time. Table 2 plots the difference between immigrant and native-born incarceration rates at age 33 for people born in different years. Table 2 shows that immigrants of various years of birth have lower incarceration rates when compared to native-born Americans.
We also fit an individual-level logistic model to see whether immigrants were more likely to be incarcerated, using the ACS data from 2011 to 2023. We used only individuals aged 18–54 and put in year of birth, year, race, and state fixed effects. We found that, when controlled for demographic factors, immigrants were 48 percent less likely to be newly incarcerated when compared with native-born Americans.
Immigrants may have lower incarceration rates, in part, because non-citizen criminals who are incarcerated are deported after serving their sentences, which means they don’t respond to future American surveys because they are no longer on American soil. Put another way, our study measures whether the respondents have ever been incarcerated.
Our research on immigrant incarceration reveals different patterns here than in other countries. Danish immigrants, for example, have higher incarceration rates than ethnic Danes. One potential explanation is different labor market outcomes. Scholars have long noticed that employed immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than unemployed ones. Immigrants in Denmark have consistently had a lower labor force participation rate than native-born ethnic Danes. This is in contrast with the US foreign-born population, whose labor force participation rates tend to exceed native-born workers. There may also be cultural or institutional factors, such as inherent differences in criminal justice systems between the two countries or negative immigrant self-selection in Denmark.
Regardless, immigrants in the United States have a lower incarceration risk than native-born Americans by age 33, and their legal status, race or ethnicity, year of birth, and region of settlement in the United States do not change that outcome. This is further evidence that immigrants do not disproportionately contribute to crime.