Immigrants and Crime

City University of New York (CUNY)
CUNY Academic Works
Publications and Research John Jay College of Criminal Justice
2020
Immigrants and Crime

Daniel L. Stageman
CUNY John Jay College
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Daniel L. Stageman
Subject: Critical Criminology, International Crime Online Publication Date: Jul 2020
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.563
Summary and Keywords
The gap between public perception of immigrant criminality and the research consensus
on immigrants’ actual rates of criminal participation is persistent and cross-cultural.
While the available evidence shows that immigrants worldwide tend to participate in
criminal activity at rates slightly lower than the native-born, media and political discourse
portraying immigrants as uniquely crime-prone remains a pervasive global phenomenon.
This apparent disconnect is rooted in the dynamics of othering, or the tendency to dehu
manize and criminalize identifiable out-groups. Given that most migration decisions are
motivated by economic factors, othering is commonly used to justify subjecting immi
grants to exploitative labor practices, with criminalization often serving as the rationale
for excluding immigrants from full participation in the social contract. When considered
in the context of social harm, immigrants’ relationship to crime and criminality becomes
more complex, especially where migration decisions are forced or made under coercive
circumstances involving ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other state crimes; many recent
examples of these dynamics have rendered large numbers of migrants effectively state
less. Experiencing the direct or collateral effects of state crimes can, in turn, affect immi
grants’ participation in a wide range of crime types, from status crimes such as prostitu
tion or survival theft to terrorism and organized criminal activity such as drug trafficking
or human trafficking. While there is no available research evidence indicating that immi
grants participate in any given crime type at higher rates than the native-born, the dy
namics of transnational criminal activity—reliant on multinational social networks, multi
lingual communication, and transportation across borders—favor immigrant participa
tion, though such crimes are often facilitated by multinational corporations.
Keywords: immigrants, immigration, crime, criminality, othering, social harm, globalization, statelessness, interna
tional criminology
Introduction
Despite a strong and long-standing social scientific consensus that immigrants engage in
crime at levels slightly below their native-born counterparts (Ousey & Kubrin, 2018;
Sampson, 2008), fear of crime associated with immigrants remains a global phenomenon,
driving political rhetoric, media discourse, policymaking, criminal justice, and immigra
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tion control practices from North America to Europe to the Global South. The perceived
association between immigrants and criminality is a phenomenon with deep historical
roots that transcend any particular culture; it is linked to ethnocentrism and othering,
wherein dominant groups react to their exposure to alien cultural practices by criminaliz
ing those practices and dehumanizing the immigrants who practice them (Young, 2007).
In the contemporary neoliberal global system, othering has led to immigrants being par
ticularly vulnerable to economic and other forms of exploitation (Cheliotis, 2017), as well
as criminal victimization ranging from fraud and human trafficking to genocide and eth
nic cleansing.
While the consistent portrayal and perception of immigrants as disproportionately crime-

prone is a misconception of their criminal participation across a global mean, both natur
al variance and contextual factors can lead to immigrant participation in specific crime
types and places that departs from that mean. While the decision to immigrate is most of
ten driven by the push-pull factors of labor supply (of which there is generally an excess
in source countries) and labor demand (excess in destination countries), circumstances of
immigration, such as its motivations and the reception immigrant’s experience upon ar
rival in destination countries, can vary significantly in ways that correlate with immigrant
participation in specific crime types. For these reasons and others related to contempo
rary dynamics of globalization, immigrants in many regions of the world engage in pat
terns of crime and criminality that are qualitatively distinct from the patterns of their na
tive-born counterparts; transnational criminal networks, for example, commonly consist
of disproportionate numbers of immigrants due to their reliance on international relation
ships for their primary criminal activities (Selee, 2018). Current systems of immigration
control and enforcement, however, are generally poorly designed to address specific qual
itative variations in the criminal participation of immigrants, instead adopting a totalizing
approach that elides the distinction between criminal and non-criminal immigrants (or
crime severity) and utilizes exclusion, detention, and deportation in a manner that exacer
bates criminality and other social problems within the communities targeted.
Dynamics of Global Migration

Contemporary global migration features a number of routes and patterns that are unique
to the 21st century, alongside continued large-scale flows rooted in the postcolonial rela
tionships of the second half of the 20th century (Castles & Miller, 2009). The United
States has been the top destination for immigrants throughout this period, currently host
ing some 20% of the world’s migrants, who make up about 14% of the country’s 320 mil
lion residents. The first major shift in 20th-century immigration patterns to the United
States occurred with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which removed quotas fa
voring migrants from Europe. Following passage of the act, the largest source of immi
grants to the United States shifted rapidly from Europe to Latin America (primarily Mexi
co). More recent shifts have seen a sharp decrease in Mexican immigration to the United
States, with increasing numbers fleeing crime and violence in the Northern Triangle
countries of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) as irregular mi
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grants and asylum seekers. Large numbers of economic migrants from South and East
Asia (primarily India and China) currently dominate authorized migration to the United
States (Chishti & Hipsman, 2015), seeking opportunities as students, entrepreneurs, and
tech workers (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Comparative populations of foreign-born

residents in the United States from China, India and
Mexico, 2000–2013.
In Europe, migrant flows from former overseas colonies (such as from the Caribbean and
South Asia to the United Kingdom; Suriname and Indonesia to Holland; and Algeria, West
Africa, and Southeast Asia to France), while still active, were first eclipsed by refugee
flows from the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, followed by internal European migrants
from East to West after the accession of several less economically prosperous Eastern Eu
ropean nations to the common labor market of the European Union (EU) in 2004. Finally,
a recent wave of refugees, primarily fleeing the civil war in Syria and ongoing conflicts in
Iraq and Afghanistan, has led anti-immigrant sentiment to the forefront of political dis
course across the continent, arguably driving the election of increasingly authoritarian
governments (Stockemer, 2016). A similar movement to Australia has led the government
there to adopt the controversial policy of indefinite extraterritorial detention for attempt
ed irregular migrants and asylum seekers on Manus Island and elsewhere in Papua New
Guinea (Welch, 2014). Across the rest of the world, noteworthy migration flows include
mass movements of contract laborers from South Asia and the Philippines to the oil-pro
ducing nations of the Arabian peninsula (where they make up nearly 90% of the current
population of the United Arab Emirates) (McPhillips, 2017), continued flows into Russia
from the states of the former Soviet Union, and the flight of Rohingya refugees into
Bangladesh from ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Intracontinental economic and other mi
gration also takes place in Latin America (e.g., from Bolivia and Venezuela into Brazil),
Africa (from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, etc., into South Africa), and Asia (from Southeast
Asia and the Philippines into China, Japan, and Korea), albeit involving considerably low
er rates and total numbers alike.
The history of global migration, from ancient times to the present, is one that is complex
and punctuated by conflict, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, the displacement of indige
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nous peoples, and genocide; these legacies contribute to contemporary ethnic conflicts
and economic disparities that drive immigration to the present day. Rarely, however, are
they considered contextual factors in recent discourse around the presumed criminal
propensities of immigrants, except insofar as the violence and other social problems left
in their wake feed into racial and ethnic stereotypes that ostensibly explain why migrants
belonging to these groups are undesirable, biologically or culturally inferior, or crime-
prone. Legacies of colonialism are insufficiently discussed as drivers of immigration, or to
contextualize major migration flows in terms of prior extractions of wealth and resources
that followed the same routes and directionality. Postcolonial migration to Europe and the
United States from countries where large amounts of resources and wealth were extract
ed and removed during colonial periods is logical as a historical economic corrective:
populations relocating from source countries denuded of wealth and resources, in order
to sell their labor at fair market rates in the destination countries to which their original
wealth and resources were removed.1 Critical criminology and other critical social sci
ence disciplines foreground these issues in their examinations of immigrants and crime,
as examples of the harm—specifically social harm2—considered by critical criminologists
as the appropriate metric for defining crime and measuring its severity (Yar, 2012). Tradi
tional measures of crime often aggregate status offenses and survival crimes that repre
sent minimal (if any) social harm, and research that measures crime rates among immi
grants relies on these commonly used measures. A comprehensive reckoning with the
contemporary or historically contextual “crimes of the powerful” that play an outsized
role in driving global migration patterns presents a significant methodological challenge
that has yet to be addressed in quantitative research into the relationship between immi
grants and crime; it is also rarely addressed in political rhetoric or factored into immigra
tion policymaking worldwide.
Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding the

Myths and Realities of Immigrant Criminality
In examining the putative correlation between immigrant status and criminal participa
tion, scholars have tested several potential explanations (hypotheses) for why immigrants
might participate in criminal activity at rates that differ from those of their native-born
counterparts. The first set of hypotheses discussed here are potential explanations for
why immigrants might commit crime at higher levels than the native-born; while these
have proved largely unsupported by the available evidence, they remain a feature of gov
ernment policy in the design and rationale for immigration control and enforcement sys
tems worldwide (Beck, 1996; Tonry, 1997, 2014; Zatz & Smith, 2012). The second set of
explanations for why immigrants may commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born
have been supported by the evidence in scholarly analyses across a range of social sci
ence disciplines, including criminology, sociology, anthropology, political science, geogra
phy, and economics.3 Hypotheses in both categories, however, require continued testing
across national and cultural contexts and crime types in order to more firmly establish
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scholarly consensus on their importance as mediating factors in the relationship between

immigrants and crime.
Potential Mediating Factors Tending to Increase Immigrant Crime
As noted in the section “THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE

MYTHS AND REALITIES OF IMMIGRANT CRIMINALITY,” the hypotheses discussed here
have generally not been supported by the available evidence across the national contexts
in which they have been studied (Disha, 2019; Mears, 2001; Tonry, 1997). They remain,
however, a key feature of the political and policy debates surrounding immigrants and
crime in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere (Epps & Furman, 2016; Grajzl, East
wood, & Dimitrova-Grajzl, 2018). Because these ideas continue to fuel anti-immigrant
rhetoric and are frequently put forward as justifications for restrictive immigration poli
cies and broad approaches to immigration enforcement, they are subjects of continued
study by social scientists.
• Immigrants might come from cultures of origin where crime is comparatively accept
able (Mears, 2001). This contention may be framed as a variant of cultural deficit theo
ry4 when discussed generally (Patel, 2016), or as culture conflict theory in discussion of
specific crime types and categories of immigrants, such as the perceived higher partic
ipation rates of Muslim immigrants in terrorist activity (Erez, 2000; Freilich, Newman,
Shoham, & Addad, 2018; Martinez & Lee, 2000; Sampson, 2008; Wortley, 2009).
• Immigrants might not respect the laws or culture of the destination country. Another
variant of culture conflict theory, this explanation suggests that immigrants oppose
specific aspects of the destination country’s legal codes or cultural traditions, or ac
tively choose to participate in criminal activity because of disagreement with or disap
proval of the destination country’s foreign policy, history, economic system, and so on.
Again, this explanation is commonly deployed to explain presumed immigrant dedica
tion to terrorism. It is also utilized to support popular assumptions of criminality
among irregular migrants, who may have engaged in illegal border crossings or visa
overstays that many see as fundamentally criminal acts. In this interpretation, the will
ingness of immigrants to undertake an illegal border crossing is seen as an indication
of their willingness to violate other legal codes once in residence in the destination
country.5
• Criminals may emigrate in disproportionately higher numbers than law-abiding mem
bers of society from source countries, resulting in immigrant flows that are dispropor
tionately criminal. This idea posits immigration as a specific opportunity for criminals,
who in turn make a rational choice to immigrate in order to pursue criminal gain in
destination countries. It has been promoted heavily by current U.S. President Donald
Trump and members of his administration, who suggest that Mexico and Central Amer
ica are “not sending their best” but rather large numbers of gang members, drug traf
fickers, and others who do not fit the typical profile of the labor migrant.
• An inability or disinclination on the part of immigrants to assimilate or integrate “ap
propriately” into the culture and society of the destination country may lead them to
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increased criminality out of need, naiveté, or frustration (Disha, 2019). It may also lead
to increased marginalization of immigrant communities, which will take on through dif
ferential association (Matsueda, 2001) the criminality assumed to be a feature of
poverty and common to native-born minority groups with whom they now reside in
close contact. On a community or neighborhood level, this dynamic also fits with social
disorganization theory (Shaw & McKay, 1942), in which the ethnically and linguistical
ly diverse urban neighborhoods that immigrants share with native-born minority
groups lack the informal networks and social capital that suppress crime in more ho
mogenous areas.
Potential Mediating Factors Tending to Decrease Immigrant Crime
The aforementioned labor market dynamics that drive the majority of global migration
are often associated with differentials in mean quality of life between source and destina
tion countries that are also a major factor in the decision to emigrate; in general, the
more significant this differential, the more risk and effort migrants are willing to undergo
to relocate (Massey, Durand, & Malone, 2003; Massey & Sanchez, 2010). Because eco
nomic and quality-of-life motivators are the primary drivers for most decisions to relocate
—with or without authorization or documentation—immigrants have a meaningful incen
tive not to draw official attention to themselves as individuals or to their communities.
Scholarly consensus holds that this is one of a suite of related incentives that provide a
“protective factor” leading to lower rates of crime commission among first-generation im
migrants and within the communities where they are found (Wolff, Intravia, Baglivio, &
Piquero, 2018; Xie & Baumer, 2018). The majority of economic migrants are motivated
workers with minimal idle time to participate in criminal activity; they have generally
aged out of the most criminogenic phase of the life course (16–24); they have strong so
cial networks and economic dependents, both in their countries of origin and in their des
tination countries, and they are highly motivated, as evinced by success in carrying out
their original decision to emigrate.
Structural factors may also play a role in the complex relationship between crime com
mission and victimization. Immigrants who find themselves as linguistic minorities in
their destination countries may have difficulty communicating with authorities in in
stances of victimization or witnessing of a criminal act. Cultural insularity may also be a
factor, particularly where perpetrators are fellow immigrants or members of the victim’s
community. Unauthorized or undocumented immigrants may fear self-reporting criminal
victimization or other kinds of interaction with legal authorities in destination countries,
for fear of exposing their status.6 Finally, immigrants in destination countries where anti-
immigrant sentiment is a strong and consistent presence in the national discourse may
lack the necessary trust in their host society—or the legal authorities whom they perceive
to represent its interests—to solve crime problems experienced by the immigrant commu
nity. Thus, underreporting by immigrants of crimes such as domestic abuse, interpersonal
violence, fraud, and theft, among others, may obscure community-level crime rates, and—
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assuming a significant proportion of the perpetrators of these unreported crimes are

themselves immigrants—obscure per capita rates of immigrant criminality.
Categories and Circumstances with Potentially

Mediating Effects on Immigrant Crime Com
mission
Several additional factors may further mediate the theoretical relationships between im
migration and crime.
Generational Effects
Evidence suggests that as immigrants assimilate (i.e., second- or “1.5-generation” immi

grants who made the journey as very young children), their criminal offending patterns
meet—and in some cases exceed—those of their native-born counterparts (Bersani, 2014).
The theory of segmented assimilation suggests that social class and racial/ethnic or reli
gious minority status influence the trajectory of assimilation for second and subsequent
generations of immigrants (Portes & Zhou, 1993; Rumbaut, 1994). The theory posits three
distinct assimilation trajectories for immigrants based on these and other contextual fac
tors: immigrants from middle-class backgrounds who are racially and ethnically similar to
the national majority (or able to pass as such) assimilate smoothly into the destination
country’s middle class within one or two generations; immigrants who are middle class
and able to take an entrepreneurial approach to migration but are racially, ethnically, or
religiously distinct become economically prosperous while maintaining a strong and sepa
rate linguistic and cultural identity; and labor migrants who experience prejudice and
curtailed economic opportunities in the destination country experience downward assimi
lation (Waldinger & Feliciano, 2004), entering a cycle of poverty akin to that experienced
by native minority groups (such as African Americans in the United States, indigenous
peoples in Canada and Australia, etc.) that is most closely associated with an increase in
criminal offending patterns at the one and a half and second generations (Bersani, 2014;
Portes & Zhou, 1993; Rumbaut, 1994).
Irregular Migration, Unauthorized and Undocumented Immigrants
Immigrants who reside in destination countries where their presence has not been offi
cially sanctioned by the relevant immigration authorities, and who therefore do not hold
official documentation of their legal status, are described by scholars as “unauthorized”
or “undocumented,” terms that will be used in tandem throughout this article. These de
scriptors are widely considered more appropriate than the colloquial term “illegal immi
grant” for a number of reasons: (a) they are more accurate, since illegal denotes actions
that are proscribed in criminal law and immigration status is generally adjudicated under
civil law; (b) they are grammatically correct, since illegal is an adjective appropriately ap
plied to proscribed actions and activities rather than individuals; and (c) they do not serve
Page 7 of 35

to criminalize immigrants, as the term “illegal immigrants” implies a pre-judgment of

criminality where none may exist other than the civil status violation to which the phrase
refers.
The development of the illegal immigrant archetype—along with the development of a

massive, highly invasive immigration control and enforcement infrastructure in response
—is primarily an American phenomenon, albeit one that has been adopted and adapted in
a number of nations around the globe in the 21st century. In the developed world, fear of
crime has gained considerable strength as a motivator of anti-immigrant sentiment and
rationale for increasingly stringent immigration enforcement, overtaking concerns over
labor competition, fears of disease or cultural contagion, tribalism, and overt racial or
ethnic animus, among others—perhaps counterintuitively so, given the concurrent reality
that crime rates have been dropping steadily across the developed world for some 30
years (Tseloni, Mailley, Farrell, & Tilley, 2010). The reasons for these changes have been
theorized in a number of ways by scholars in different schools of thought: in attempting
to come to terms with the anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding the Trump administration
in the United States, Brexit in the United Kingdom (Golec de Zavala, Guerra, & Simao,
2017; Outhwaite, 2018), or authoritarian leaders such as Hungary’s Victor Orban and
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, scholars and media commentators alike have remarked upon the
degree of overt racial and ethnic animus expressed by these leaders themselves as well
as their followers in advocating for or justifying anti-immigrant policies—often alongside
rationales rooted in perceived immigrant criminality rather than in place of them. These
critical scholars argue that this juxtaposition demonstrates that fear of crime is in fact a
proxy for racial and ethnic animus, originally deployed due to social desirability or as an
explicit political strategy intended to expand popular support. Given that both racial ani
mus and criminalization are rooted in othering—the dehumanizing of people distinct from
the majority or dominant group due to physical and cultural markers, participation in pro
scribed or taboo activities, and so forth—this explanation is logically sound, if difficult to
operationalize and therefore understudied.7
Extending this theoretical argument, scholars of political economy argue that anti-immi
grant rhetoric and the resulting high levels of investment in control and enforcement in
frastructure are tacitly promoted by corporations and holders of capital with a vested in
terest in increasing public spending on securitization: that is, the infrastructure, policies
and processes of incarceration, state surveillance, and coercive violence, particularly in
the lives of the poor and disenfranchised (Astor, 2009; Menjivar, 2014; Trujillo-Pagan,
2014). In addition to direct profits from increased public spending on privatized incarcer
ation and security services, this approach further enhances the traditional role of immi
grants as a flexible and exploitable low-wage labor source: if immigrant laborers are kept
in a state of constant credible fear about an ever-growing immigration enforcement and
control apparatus bent upon their incarceration and eventual removal, they will avoid
drawing attention to themselves and their communities via labor actions or other advoca
cy, and they will be less likely to report high levels of exploitation involving mechanisms
such as wage theft, unsafe or unsanitary working conditions or employer-provided hous
ing, violations of minimum wage and overtime laws, and the like (Sung, Delgado, Pena, &
Page 8 of 35

Paladino, 2013). In the United States, attributions of criminality further enhance this flex
ible exploitability by providing mechanisms for immigrants to occupy local and private
correctional infrastructure that is increasingly underutilized due to falling incarceration
rates; in Europe, the massive overrepresentation of immigrants in many correctional sys
tems sustains them at their current scale, further fueling the economic engine of securiti
zation there (Arriaga, 2016, 2017; De Giorgi, 2010; Stageman, 2019).
Stateless Populations
Many nations around the globe feature significant populations of stateless persons within
their borders—often as a direct result of government policy. A stateless person is an indi
vidual, ethnic group, or class of persons whose nationality is disputed or contested, and
who therefore cannot draw upon citizenship rights in their country of residence, their
country of origin (which are in many cases one and the same), or any other.8 Disputes re
sulting in statelessness are often the result of long-standing ethnic or tribal antagonisms
playing out in government policy, wherein the ascendant group seeks to further marginal
ize and disenfranchise the subordinate one. Contemporary examples include the plight of
ethnic Vietnamese residents in Cambodia, who are systematically being denied documen
tation and pushed out of communities where they have resided for generations (Mauk,
2018), or the Rohingya people in Myanmar, a Muslim minority in this primarily Buddhist
country, who have been denied citizenship, subjected to ethnic cleansing, and pushed into
neighboring Bangladesh in large numbers as refugees (Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights, 2017). Attributions of criminality to the targeted minority group are a
common aspect of the processes leading to their statelessness, as is the criminalization of
specific cultural practices that can serve as a pretext to displacement. Groups subjected
to statelessness are frequently displaced, leading them to flee to neighboring nations as
refugees or seek asylum elsewhere.
Stateless peoples are at a significantly increased risk of victimization when compared to

other migrant categories, encompassing both the state crimes and the crimes against hu
manity discussed in this article, as well as human trafficking, forced labor, fraud, extor
tion, and sexual and physical violence. It is unclear, however, whether stateless peoples
are more likely to themselves engage in criminal activity, a question further obscured by
the tendency of governments in their territories of origin to criminalize cultural practices
and status offenses as a pretext to ethnic cleansing. Historically stateless or transient
populations such as the Roma (colloquially known as Gypsies) of Europe or the “Irish
Travellers” of the United Kingdom, have widely accepted reputations for criminality in
their countries of residence and transit. These reputations are reinforced by a culture of
transience within these communities, contributing to a sense on the part of settled popu
lations of a separate and closed society with unknown values and unfamiliar traditions.
While there is no indication that crime rates are higher for transient peoples such as the
Roma, transient and closed societies provide increased opportunities and motivations for
externally directed property crimes, contributing to a perception of higher rates of crimi
nality regardless of the lack of evidence (Petrova, 2003). The mutually reinforcing dynam
ics of othering directed at immigrants by native-born populations, and social closure and
Page 9 of 35

enforced separation on the part of immigrant communities in response, are not unique to
the Roma and other traditionally transient populations; indeed, they have long been ob
served in the mutual suspicion between native and immigrant populations in Europe in
particular (Safi, 2009). While there is again limited evidence that these dynamics con
tribute to increased immigrant participation in crime regardless of their country of origin
or residence, they do appear to hinder meaningful multicultural dialogue and curtail eco
nomic and social opportunities for immigrants and their children in the communities in
question.
Limitations on the Study of Immigrant Crimi

nality
A number of factors limit empirical study of the relationship between immigration and
crime in a global context.
Definitional Limitations
The relative lack of global consensus on definitions for the concepts of “crime” and “im
migrant” alike precludes a full and complete reckoning with the involvement of immi
grants in criminal activity worldwide. Major differences across international legal sys
tems mean that what is legally proscribed in one nation-state may be both non-criminal
and culturally acceptable in another; legal codes in nations that circumscribe human and
civil rights within their borders may be widely viewed as unjust—and possibly criminal in
and of themselves by the critical measure of social harm—in less authoritarian nations
that place a higher value on democratic participation and individual autonomy. This
means that crime and victim categories that have recently won hard-fought recognition in
more progressive nations—such as rape or other sexual offenses, violent crimes including
domestic violence, or hate crimes against women, racial/ethnic minorities, or LGBTQ indi
viduals—may be officially unrecognized or tacitly ignored under more conservative crimi
nal justice systems; in some of these societies, homosexuality itself is a punishable status
offense (Carrington, Hogg, & Sozzo, 2016; Henne & Troshynski, 2013).
Limitations on the definition of “immigrant” also speak to major global controversies and
disagreements. Some of these engender strong sentiments among the individuals and
groups deeply invested in one or another interpretation of their meaning, while resisting
easy resolution on the international stage. The Palestinian “right of return,” for example,
is intended by groups representing the Palestinian cause to establish the inalienable right
of Palestinian refugees to return to lands owned by their ancestors that are currently oc
cupied by the state of Israel (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016). This idea has also, however, al
lowed the neighboring Arab countries surrounding Israel—many of which have for
decades hosted sizable populations of Palestinian refugees and their descendants—to
classify their Palestinian populations as refugees rather than immigrants. In some cases,
this classification has persisted into the third and fourth generations, resulting in distinct
internal populations who are not accorded the full rights of citizens (see the section
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“STATELESS POPULATIONS”). The case for Turkish and other “guest workers” in Ger
many was similar throughout the 20th century, while Germany’s jus sanguinis persisted
(Schonteich, 2013).9 Until these laws were changed in the 21st century, multiple genera
tions of Turks—many of whom had largely assimilated into mainstream German culture—
lived within Germany’s borders but were not accorded the full rights of citizens. An even
more stark example of this phenomenon currently persists in the oil-rich nations of the
Arabian Peninsula, with the huge populations of South Asian and other “guest
workers” (in the case of the United Arab Emirates, these workers make up almost 90% of
the nation’s residents) whose ruthlessly exploited labor fueled these countries’ recent
building booms and explosive economic growth (Gardner, 2010).
Limitations of the Available Evidence
In addition to definitional issues, the quality and reliability of statistics on both crime and
immigration in many parts of the world are extremely limited—or, in the case of many na
tions in the Global South, unavailable entirely outside very broad estimates (Fargues,
2009). The control of data collection and distribution on these important social and demo
graphic issues allows both authoritarian and ostensibly democratic governments to ma
nipulate these statistics in ways that suit their political and public relations needs; in
deed, the recent attempt in the United States to include questions about citizenship sta
tus on the 2020 census is widely seen not as being motivated by a meaningful interest in
collecting better data on this topic but as a political ploy to drive down response rates in
areas with high concentrations of (especially unauthorized/undocumented) immigrants,
thus reducing the proportional representation these populations are accorded in state
and federal legislatures (New York et al. v. U.S. Department of Commerce et al., 2018).10
Where data are unreliable, nonexistent, or widely viewed as subject to significant manipu
lation, scholars cannot make decisive analyses of the connection (or lack thereof) be
tween immigration and crime. The fact that others—such as political advocacy organiza
tions, government officials, media commentators, or non-governmental organizations
(NGOs)—continue to make claims on the basis of such evidence reveals more about their
motives and interests than it does about the issue at hand (Anti-Defamation League,
2018; Berry, Garcia-Blanco, & Moore, 2015). The preponderance of the reliable evidence
available reveals that there is nothing intrinsically criminogenic—or, indeed, anything in
trinsically anti-criminogenic—about immigrants as a population category; rather, contex
tual factors closely linked to the circumstances under which individuals and groups mi
grate, their reception and status within the society and culture of the destination country,
and the availability of economic opportunity and social support appear to influence the of
fending patterns of first and subsequent generations of immigrants alike.
Page 11 of 35

Figure 2. Top 20 destinations (left) and origins

(right) of international migrants in 2015 (millions).
Source: U.N. Department of Economic and Social Af

fairs (2015).
Regional Overviews of the Available Evidence

on Immigrant Crime
Just as there is massive variance in the scale of immigration around the globe (see Figure
2), there is also significant variance by region in the quantity, quality, and rigor of re
search on the criminal participation of immigrants.11 This section attempts to provide an
overview of the major issues surrounding immigrants, their treatment in political rhetoric
and popular discourse, and their involvement in crime in each of the listed regions. For
some of these regions, however, little to no reliable research exists on the subject. Where
this is the case, we have drawm information from related scholarly research, NGO re
ports, and mainstream media to provide a broad sense of the issues and perceptions fac
ing contemporary immigrants in the areas in question, with all possible consideration of
real or perceived immigrant crime participation within the confines of the available evi
dence.
Immigrants in North America
Much of the most reliable global evidence on immigrant crime participation comes from
North America, and the United States in particular. The importance of immigration to
American history cannot be overstated, nor can the degree to which that history is inter
twined with ideas of crime: much of the immigration to the continent during the colonial
period preceding American independence was driven by transportation, or the official ex
ile of British convicted criminals to the country’s overseas possessions (transportation al
so features heavily in Australian history, to the extent that it has become part of the
Page 12 of 35

nation’s foundational identity) (Bleichmar, 1999; Ekirch, 1990). While this practice was
quickly curtailed by the newly independent United States, the exploitative labor that was
its most salient economic feature continued, in successive waves of European mass mi
gration (most notably from regions suffering significant poverty and privation) to the
North, and in the importation of enslaved Africans to the South. In both cases, attribu
tions of criminal propensity to these ethnically distinct populations were frequently uti
lized to rationalize coercive practices directed against them by the state and private in
terests, further ensuring that these groups provided the maximum labor for the minimum
cost. While the successive generations of European immigrants and their offspring assim
ilated over time into the developing dominant ethnic category of whiteness, the dominant
white majority expended considerable social, cultural, economic, and political effort to
maintain the separate and inferior status of blackness for the country’s African American
minority, even after the ending of slavery following the American Civil War (Patterson,
1985). The codification of these categories further extended labor exploitation (through
mechanisms such as convict leasing) and social exclusion (through Jim Crow segregation)
for black Americans (Mancini, 1996).
The legally defined minority status of African Americans, in turn, provided the template
for additional excluded and marginalized racial categories that developed as labor migra
tion to the country became increasingly globalized and diverse. This process culminated
in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which established the first major restriction on immi
gration to the United States, and brought a formerly localized and largely informal immi
gration control apparatus under the purview of the federal government (Kanstroom,
2007; Trucios-Haynes, 1997). Restrictions around racial and ethnic undesirability became
increasingly caught up in attributions of criminal intent as the states of the American
South turned to techniques such as convict leasing to justify the continued forced labor of
African Americans post-slavery (Mancini, 1996); such policies provided legal precedent
for exploiting the labor of ostensibly crime-prone non-European immigrants when the
economy required, and forcibly ejecting them when it did not. This dynamic found its
starkest example in the Bracero Program which brought Mexican workers into the coun
try during the labor shortages of World War II, and Operation Wetback which deported
them en masse once the pressing need for their labor had subsided (Astor, 2009). Far
from being a new phenomenon, the current promotion of the myth of the criminal immi
grant in U.S. political discourse and federal government policy is a long-standing tradi
tion, featuring complex layers of legal precedent and cultural rationalization, which
serves to instrumentalize vast segments of the largest immigrant population in the world
to the considerable benefit of American enterprise—and in a manner that explicitly rein
forces an American racial hierarchy particularly benefiting whites (Prieto, 2018).
American research on immigrant criminality thus takes place within the context of this
tension: the vital importance of immigration to the formation and founding myths of the
American Republic; the social and legal realities of a racially stratified society, at best
partially dismantled by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement; a long-standing tradi
tion of crimmigration, in which the intertwined apparatuses of crime control and immi
gration control serve the interests of capital (Stumpf, 2006) by disciplining labor and se
Page 13 of 35

curitizing (i.e., through mass incarceration) whole populations whose labor force partici
pation is tenuous; and a sizable population of uniquely vulnerable undocumented immi
grants, who face alongside America’s other underprivileged groups a host of severe social
problems associated with poverty and social exclusion, of which crime is only one impor
tant element. The surprising quality and quantity of American research on this issue
across the social sciences therefore belies the extraordinary political pressures under
which much of this work has taken place, particularly since Donald Trump’s election to
the American presidency on an explicitly anti-immigrant platform. As collected in a meta-analy
sis by Ousey and Kubrin (2018), 51 high-quality quantitative studies conducted between
1994 and 2014 found statistically significant negative correlations between immigration
and crime two and a half times as often as positive ones, indicating an overall dynamic
that is both globally consistent, and deeply at odds with the driving narrative in U.S. poli
tics and policy. There are clear indications that aggressive immigration enforcement and
highly restrictive immigration control policies exacerbate social problems within immi
grant communities, rather than providing meaningful solutions to social problems experi
enced by U.S. residents as a whole (Engelbrecht, 2018; Leyro & Stageman, 2018).
This established American template—of media coverage, political discourse, and immigra
tion policy at odds with scientific consensus—is followed worldwide, with minimal varia
tion (Segal, Elliott, & Mayadas, 2010; Silverman & Massa, 2012). Further, U.S. policies
around the punishment of immigrants—through civil detention and deportation, as well as
the hypercriminalization of immigration offenses—have provided a template that coun
tries around the world have adopted to varying degrees in their own immigration enforce
ment.12 With its origins in the lockdown refugee camps the United States developed as a
racialized response to the influx of Haitian “boat people” in the early 1980s—and public
fear of their presumed criminal propensities—the U.S. immigrant detention system
evolved into an infrastructure that currently confines an average of nearly 50,000 immi
grants on any given day (Altman & Small, 2019; Chishti, Pierce, & Capps, 2019; Loyd &
Mountz, 2018). Its exponential 40-year growth can be explained in part by the actions of
“punishment entrepreneurs”: private, for-profit prison corporations and local govern
ments seeking to host detention facilities as economic anchors to offset the loss of manu
facturing jobs (Stageman, 2019). The potential for profit and other economic benefits
gives numerous individuals and institutional actors a direct self-interest in the continued
criminalization of immigrants; not only do for-profit detention corporations like GEO
Group and CoreCivic lobby for criminalizing and punitive immigration policies, they have
also spread their detention business model to other countries such as the United King
dom and Australia (see sections “IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM” and “IMMI
GRANTS IN AUSTRALIA”) (Flynn & Cannon, 2009; Furman, Epps, & Lamphear, 2016;
Mainwaring & Cook, 2018). No other country, however, has privatized immigrant deten
tion to an extent that approaches the United States, where current estimates suggest up
to 73% of detained immigrants are held in private, for-profit facilities (Haberman, 2018).
Page 14 of 35

Immigrants in Latin America and the Caribbean
Outside border regions that feature regular cross-border traffic, internal migration within
Latin America is estimated to be low. As a transit point for immigrants from Central
America, Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere seeking to enter the United States, Mexico
has increasingly become an indefinite stopover for those prevented from reaching their
intended destination. This phenomenon has intensified with the Trump administration’s
“Remain in Mexico” policy, under which individuals seeking asylum at the U.S. border are
prevented from entering until their asylum hearing takes place. This policy, partly justi
fied through appeals to public safety rooted in attributions of criminality to asylum seek
ers, has in fact resulted in this already vulnerable population experiencing high rates of
criminal victimization during their time in Mexico (Human Rights First, 2019). In South
America, political unrest, government corruption, and shortages of food and other basic
needs goods have caused significant outmigration from Venezuela to the surrounding
countries of Colombia, Peru, and Brazil (see Figure 3), where these immigrants are fre
quently blamed in the media for increases in criminal activity in the communities where
they settle (Faiola & Lopes, 2018; International Organization for Migration, 2018). In the
Caribbean, attributions of criminality to Haitian immigrants and residents of Haitian de
scent in the neighboring Dominican Republic were the driving force for the latter
country’s 2013 change in citizenship law, rendering some 134,000 Haitians and Domini
cans of Haitian descent effectively stateless (Alami, 2018; Jones, 2018).
Figure 3. Comparative Venezualan diaspora popula

tions, 2015 and 2017–2018
Source: Migration trends in the Americas

(International Organization for Migration, 2018).
Immigrants in the United Kingdom
Anti-immigrant sentiment and perceptions of immigrant criminality among native-born

Britons was a major driver of the Brexit referendum’s unexpected success (Golec de
Zavala et al., 2017), presenting a clear parallel to the disconnect between U.S. political
Page 15 of 35

discourse and the research consensus on the involvement of immigrants in criminal activ
ity. Available research on the involvement of UK immigrants in crime and criminal activity
indicates that the relationship there is similar to that found in the United States: either no
effect or a modestly negative one (Bell, Fasani, & Machin, 2013). This pattern was estab
lished in the 20th century with the steady postcolonial influx of immigrants from the
South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Jaitman & Machin, 2013). Find
ings of no relationship or a negative relationship between immigrants and crime have re
mained consistent across the two major subsequent waves of immigration to the United
Kingdom that have taken place since 1997: a large flow of asylum seekers fleeing wars
and breakdowns in national governance in countries including Yugoslavia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Somalia that peaked around 2002 and an influx of EU citizens from the
countries of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Baltic
States following their accession to the EU’s common labor market in 2004. Despite these
immigration waves being highly distinct both culturally and economically, none led to an
increase in either property crime or violent crime. More recently, large-scale immigration
from Romania and Bulgaria to the United Kingdom following the 2014 accession of those
countries to the EU was found to exhibit the same pattern—though high levels of immi
gration from this wave were found to be correlated with slightly higher levels of drug of
fenses (Stansfield, 2016). This finding tends to support the idea that transnational and re
lated crime (see section “IMMIGRANTS AND TRANSNATIONAL CRIME”) is one excep
tional category in which immigrants may be overrepresented.
Despite a basis in bad faith arguments and mistaken beliefs about the place of immi
grants in British society, the process of withdrawal from membership in the European
Union set in motion by the 2016 Brexit referendum has been finalized in 2020. The exact
nature of the more restrictive immigration control policies that will follow has yet to be
determined, along with what—if any—effect these measures may have on crime rates in
the United Kingdom. The co-occurrence of the United Kingdom’s large-scale 21st-century
increase in immigration with a crime drop similar to that experienced by the United
States over the same time period (Redgrave, 2018) has featured rarely in media discus
sions surrounding Brexit.
Immigrants in Mainland Europe
Crimmigration rhetoric in Europe has produced significant negative consequences for im
migrants to the continent, where De Giorgi (2010) found hyper-incarceration rates (i.e.,
the rate as a multiple of the incarceration rate of nationals) of foreign-born prisoners
ranging from 3.8 (in France and Germany) to 14.4 (Italy), with an average EU hyper-in
carceration rate of 6.2. This dynamic persists despite no evidence that immigrants to Eu
rope offend at rates higher than their native-born counterparts (Bircan & Hooghe, 2011;
Nunziata, 2015). An explanation may be found in a study of EU countries showing that
while increased immigration rates do not increase crime victimization, they are positively
associated with an increase in fear of crime among native-born residents (Nunziata,
2015).
Page 16 of 35

Fear of immigrant crime and immigrant criminals, along with the nativism and ethnic
prejudice with which it regularly co-occurs, has in recent years driven the increased suc
cess of authoritarian, right-wing parties and politicians in elections across Europe (Mud
de, 2012; Stockemer, 2016). Anti-immigrant parties currently control the governments of
Italy, Hungary, and Poland, and hold significant numbers of seats in the parliaments of
many others, as well as the European parliament itself (Nakamura & Witte, 2018), where
they continue to manipulate public fears about Europe’s ongoing “crisis” influx of
refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war, and the aftermath of recent high-casualty terrorist
attacks perpetrated by ISIS-affiliated immigrants and foreign nationals (National Consor
tium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2019). There is currently a
high potential for this movement to force the European Union to adopt more restrictive
policies toward refugees, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants—a move that would
likely exacerbate issues of criminal victimization plaguing refugee camps in Greece (Ben
Farhat et al., 2018), as well as creating further issues with the highly dangerous human
smuggling routes across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Southern Europe (Inter
national Organization for Migration, 2019).
Immigrants in the Middle East
The gap between perception of immigrant populations and their realities is particularly
pronounced in the fast-growing economies of the Arabian Peninsula: chiefly Saudi Arabia,
The United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Immigrant populations in many of these countries
exceed the native-born (International Organization for Migration, 2015), with the United
Arab Emirates featuring the most extreme disproportion at nearly 85% of its population
consisting of immigrants. Given the comparatively vast privileges accorded citizens of
each of these oil-based economies, the resulting dynamic is one of a deeply segmented so
ciety: citizens acting with impunity at the top; European and other professional class or
moneyed migrants of the global elite occupying a sort of legal “limbo” below them, where
severe legal consequences for minor (but culturally proscribed) transgressions are a con
stant possibility even within the context of privilege accorded the citizenry of military al
lies and trading partners; and at the bottom, contract laborers from India, Pakistan,
Nepal, the Philippines, and other labor-exporting nations suffering constant exploitation
and an almost complete lack of recourse to the legal system under Kafala (Gardner,
2010). Research on the involvement of immigrants in crime and criminal activity in these
societies is therefore limited by this dynamic, with a meaningful proportion of reported
crimes consisting of vague or trumped-up charges of moral turpitude (Nordland, 2017),
and conviction rates skewed by the almost total lack of legal rights accorded to the immi
grant accused (Murray, 2012). Public perception of immigrant criminality in these coun
tries appears to be driven by a handful of high-profile cases (Gutierrez, 2019), some of
which concluded in obvious and disturbing miscarriages of justice, in countries where de
capitation and amputation still stand as commonly applied, legally sanctioned punish
ments for non-capital crimes. If the story of immigrant othering and attributions of crimi
nality is one inextricably linked to labor exploitation, curtailment of human and civil
rights, and political suppression, then the Kafala system and the situation of immigrants
Page 17 of 35

in the countries of the Arabian peninsula is emblematic of the extremes to which a ruling
class and regime will go in order to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor, and the main
tenance of low-cost goods and services for the privileged few.
Immigrants in Sub-Saharan Africa
Immigration to the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa is primarily internal to the continent,

with the important exception of South Africa, which continues to attract significant mi
gratory flows from the United Kingdom and South Asia. Much of the internal migration
between Sub-Saharan African countries is driven by internal crises of governance, natur
al disaster, or war; significant recent outmigration from Zimbabwe, the Congo, South Su
dan, and Chad falls into this category, with refugees into neighboring countries fleeing
privation driven by sectarian conflict, famine, government corruption, and political re
pression. These refugees commonly face xenophobia in their destination countries, driven
in large part by fear of crime and perceptions of immigrant criminality. South Africa, in
particular, follows the pattern set in U.S. political discourse of conflating undocumented
status with criminality (Crush & Peberdy, 2018). Despite a long-term post-apartheid crime
drop paralleling that seen in Europe and the United States, a recent uptick in violent
crime rates has given South Africa an international reputation as a dangerous travel des
tination (Lehohla, 2015; Perry & Potgieter, 2013). This image bears little resemblance to
reality, and in any case, there is no evidence to suggest that recent increases in street
crime in the country are associated with immigration.
Immigrants in East Asia
China and the surrounding nations of East Asia have experienced significant economic
growth in the 21st century coupled with falling birth rates, a dynamic similar to that
which has driven much of the labor migration to North America and Europe beginning
since the latter half of the 20th century. A range of factors including government policy,
geography, and culture has historically limited labor migration to countries like Japan and
China, however, to small-scale and intermittent regional immigration patterns until the
current century, when increased international engagement (particularly on the part of
China) and accelerating demographic change have given rise to novel immigrant commu
nities like Africans in Guangzhou and Brazilians in Japan. In both cases, public percep
tion, political discourse, and media coverage surrounding these communities focuses on
compounded attributions of criminality: a generalized suspicion of immigrants rooted in
the long-standing traditions of a closed society, and recently popularized Western stereo
types of African and Latin American peoples as disproportionately criminogenic (Friman,
2001; Lan, 2015). There is little indication in the research literature that these attribu
tions of criminality match the reality of criminal participation rates for these or more tra
ditional intraregional populations of labor migrants such as Filipinos; however, not unlike
the American case, undocumented status is not clearly differentiated from other forms of
criminal participation in policy or public discourse relating to these communities
(Jimenez, 2015). Japan, for example, imposes harsh criminal penalties for overstaying
visas—a civil offense in the American context. As the scale of labor migration to the re
Page 18 of 35

gion increases with China’s imminent emergence as the world’s largest economy—and fa
cilitated by major transport infrastructure projects under China’s “One Belt, One Road”
initiative—an American-style dynamic of “punitive inclusion” seems likely to develop
(Cheliotis, 2017).
Immigrants in South and Southeast Asia
The nations of South and Southeast Asia are traditionally source countries for large-scale
labor migration to many other regions, as discussed (see sections “IMMIGRANTS IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM” and “IMMIGRANTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST”). Intraregional migra
tion over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries has been punctuated by mass move
ments of refugees in response to a series of sectarian conflicts and realignments, begin
ning with the partition of British India into the Hindu nation of India and the Muslim na
tion of Pakistan, and most recently with the mass migration of Rohingya Muslims into
Bangladesh from predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (Ghosh, 2016). Not unusually, this lat
est movement began with a series of community-level conflicts incited by crimes of vio
lence: retaliatory beatings, mass rapes, arsons, and massacres between neighboring Ro
hingya and Rakhine Buddhist communities in the country’s Northwest. Myanmar’s Bud
dhist government, however, largely eschewed a meaningful resolution of these events
through criminal justice system mechanisms in favor of military retaliation and inflaming
public sentiment against the Rohingya minority. This decision set in motion an ethnic
cleansing campaign to eliminate a minority community now designated as “illegal immi
grants” by the government of Myanmar, despite the Rohingya’s long-standing, multigen
erational residence in the region (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,
2017). As refugees now primarily residing in Bangladesh, there is no data to indicate that
Rohingya forced migrants to participate in criminal activity at differing rates from native-
born residents in their host countries, though they are considered to be at high risk for
victimization through human trafficking, forced labor, and forced prostitution. Similar dy
namics face other refugees and stateless populations in the region, such as ethnic Viet
namese residents in Cambodia (Mauk, 2018). As in other regions in the world, it appears
to be consistently the case that attributions and accusations of criminality leveled against
immigrants in political discourse cause measurably more social harm than actual criminal
participation by immigrants.
Immigrants in Australia
Over a quarter of Australia’s population is overseas born, with nearly half of Australians
identifying as a first- or second-generation immigrant. The country’s immigrant popula
tion is extremely diverse, with no single source country accounting for a majority or even
a plurality of the country’s immigrants. Very little of this population is undocumented or
unauthorized according to the U.S. understanding of the concepts; due largely to
Australia’s remoteness and lack of land borders, most unauthorized immigrants in Aus
tralia are visa overstayers, a group representing approximately .02% of the country’s pop
ulation in 2010.
Page 19 of 35

Recent research (Sydes, 2017) drawing upon official census and crime incident data ex
amined the effect of immigration on violent crime across several hundred neighborhoods
in Sydney and Brisbane. The results were consistent with the research consensus on im
migrants and crime in the United States, showing that immigration is negatively associat
ed with crime in Australia as well. In terms of social disorganization, however, there is
some evidence that significant linguistic diversity within neighborhoods was positively as
sociated with violent crime, suggesting that extreme linguistic diversity could lead in
some circumstances (such as the absence of effective social services) to breakdowns in
informal social control.
Regardless of this evidence, attributions of criminality to immigrants in Australian politi

cal discourse have contributed to the country’s development of one of the most harshly
restrictive immigration control regimes in the world (Welch, 2014). Rooted in the crimino
logical theories of rational choice and deterrence, the system mandates that refugees,
asylum seekers, and attempted unauthorized migrants be detained indefinitely outside
Australia’s borders, primarily (until its closure in 2017) at the infamous Manus Regional
Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea, and at other detention centers located in that
country in the years since. The stated rationale for this policy is to deter future asylum
seekers from attempting the journey to Australia—a justification rooted in the supposed
deterrent effect of criminal justice system incarceration, which this form of immigrant de
tention closely resembles. These facilities are privately managed by for-profit corrections
companies, further blurring the line between detained migrants and incarcerated crimi
nals and indicating the serious consequences that crimmigration policies can have for at
tempted migrants across the globe.
Overview of the Evidence on Immigrant Partici

pation in Select Crime Categories
Crime as a conceptual category encompasses a wide variety of culturally proscribed de
viant or transgressive activities. Breaking down the larger concept of crime into particu
larly salient subcategories and examining the variance in immigrant participation be
tween them is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between
immigration and crime in a global context.
Immigrants and Terrorism
Acts of terror committed by immigrants tend to receive more coverage (and are more
commonly defined as terrorism) than functionally similar incidents involving their native-
born counterparts. This is likely in part a lingering effect of the global attention focused
on the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, along with the series of high-
profile, high-casualty attacks carried out by immigrants and foreign nationals in major
European cities in the years since. As a result, however, similar attacks carried out by na
tive-born perpetrators—whether to advance ideologies of racism, white supremacy, tradi
tional gender relations, misogyny, or other causes—are rarely labeled as terrorism in the
Page 20 of 35

mainstream press, despite being placed in the same category by scholars and researchers
(Powell, 2011). This disproportionate attention—both in terms of the number of incidents
and the overall number of casualties (with the exception of the 9/11 attacks themselves)—
contributes to a strain of discourse in many developed nations that posits Muslim immi
grants in particular as an existential threat to the safety and culture of the nations receiv
ing them.
It is clear, in the wake of the “Muslim Ban” executive order by U.S. President Donald
Trump, Brexit in the United Kingdom, debate over the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe, and
the brutal suppression of Muslim Uighurs in Western China, that the discourse surround
ing immigrants and terrorism has led to significant negative consequences for Muslim im
migrants and religious minorities around the globe. The distance between public percep
tion and reality on this topic (as on so many of the others under discussion in this article)
is vast. While the definition of terrorism can be fluid, the generally accepted definition in
volves the use of violence in pursuit of political aims; nearly 20 years of the “War on Ter
ror” has led to an increasing reluctance on the part of national media or the popular
imagination to ascribe such aims to domestic assailants; instead, attacks by domestic ide
ologues are increasingly classified as “hate crimes” or ascribed to racial animus, whether
or not they are intended to influence politics or achieve political aims. The term “terror
ism” is thus assumed to apply to an act of war by a foreign power—most commonly identi
fied as Islam itself rather than a foreign nation—of which immigrant assailants are as
sumed to be representatives.
Scholars, however, tend to cleave more closely to the accepted definition in comparative
analyses of terrorist acts, and as such, their findings are consistent: with few exceptions,
a significant majority of terrorist attacks in a given nation-state are committed by native-
born individuals in support of the political aims of domestic groups, and the majority of
terrorist casualties are caused by these acts (National Consortium for the Study of Terror
ism and Responses to Terrorism, 2019). This is not to discount the handful of horrifying,
high-casualty attacks that have been carried out in Europe and elsewhere by Islamists,
many of whom were first- and second-generation immigrants or foreign nationals.
Incidents of terror—whether committed by foreign nationals, immigrants, or native-born

individuals—extract an effectively incalculable human cost reflected in the loss of life and
severity of injury resulting from their commission. Recent global research, however, finds
no correlation between the number of migrants in a country with either the number or
severity of terrorist attacks occurring there (Forrester, Powell, Nowrasteh, & Landgrave,
2019). This finding suggests that a primary policy goal frequently cited in anti-immigrant
rhetoric—decreased risk of terrorism—rests on a false premise. Research suggests that
reducing immigration to a given country—even narrow restrictions on immigrants from
Islamic majority countries, who anti-immigrant groups in the United States and Europe
frequently portray as presenting a higher risk of terrorism to destination countries—will
have no predictable effect on either the number or the severity of future terrorist attacks.
Page 21 of 35

Immigrants and Transnational Crime
Transnational crime presents a unique case in the involvement of immigrants in crime

and criminal activity, because the definition of the phenomenon means that it intrinsically
relies on individuals with access to multinational social and/or economic networks for its
existence. In practical terms, this means that transnational crime on its largest scale re
quires the initiation, or at least participation, of major multinational corporations for
which such networks are a matter of day-to-day business operations; recent cases such as
HSBC’s laundering of nearly $1 billion for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels (Saviano,
2016; United States of America against HSBC Holdings PLC, 2018; White, 2017) show the
importance of corporate complicity in ensuring the continued profitability of such enter
prises, and maintaining their significance and integration into the “legitimate” global
economy.
By the same token, however, the drug cartels for which HSBC laundered funds rely signif
icantly on immigrant labor for many of the criminal activities that produced the income in
question. In addition to their utilization of social networks in both the source and destina
tion countries for black market products such as drugs and trafficked individuals, immi
grants often possess the linguistic abilities necessary to communicate and translate busi
ness arrangements between networks in source and destination countries, as well as le
gitimate cause for international travel that can serve as an important cover for smuggling
and other clandestine transportation activities (Furman et al., 2016; Pickering & Ham,
2015).
Human trafficking—sex trafficking in particular—provides a particularly stark example of

the potential for the roles of crime victim and criminal offender to overlap, as well as the
complicated role played by the criminalization of status offenses in exacerbating rather
than mitigating the social harm caused by criminal activity. In many cases, legal prohibi
tions against prostitution criminalize sex workers, who may themselves be trafficked indi
viduals laboring under the threat of violence or other kinds of coercion. In other cases,
trafficked individuals may participate in or otherwise facilitate the trafficking of others,
whether due to coercion or evolving social integration into a transnational criminal net
work. The use of “madams” for the purpose of grooming newly trafficked individuals into
the local culture and traditions of sex work in destination countries has long been ob
served in sex trafficking operations worldwide. These madams are commonly themselves
former trafficking victims whose position within the transnational criminal networks that
originally trafficked them has changed and evolved over time (Meshkovska, Siegel, Stut
terheim, & Bos, 2015). In cases such as these, survival and personal advancement trump
individual trauma and collective solidarity with fellow victims.
Policy Implications
A critical criminological perspective on the relationship between immigration and crime
requires the examination of social harms resulting not only from the criminal actions of
Page 22 of 35

individuals, but also from state efforts to control these two phenomena. Immigrant deten
tion and deportation, in particular, are patterned after the punitive incarceration em
ployed by criminal justice systems across the globe. The social harms arising from ap
proaches to immigration control rooted in punitive criminal justice system practices are
thus comparable.
Detention and Deportation as Social Harms and Causes of Crime
Deportation policies pursued since the 1980s by the United States have planted the seeds
for future domestic and transnational crime and criminality in many of the source coun
tries to which deportees have historically been returned. A prime case involves El Sal
vador (along with, more recently, the other countries of Central America’s Northern Tri
angle, Honduras and Guatemala) and the MS-13 and Calle 18 street gangs. Named for
streets in the areas of Los Angeles where the gangs were originally formed in the 1980s,
American deportation policies sent many members of these gangs back to their native El
Salvador following felony convictions. There, faced with extremely limited opportunities
and minimal social ties to a society many of them had not lived in since infancy or early
childhood, these gang members re-established their previous associations and modes of
existence, at first with their fellow deportees, eventually gaining a foothold among the
general populace as well (Dingeman, 2018; Kalsi, 2018). Now, in the absence of functional
governments in the Northern Triangle, these gangs are the most significant organized au
thority in many communities throughout the region, including major urban areas, where
they have effectively usurped the state’s monopoly on violence. Their use of violence as a
first-order governance tactic and economic strategy is largely responsible for the three
Northern Triangle countries featuring some of the highest rates of homicide and other vi
olent crimes in the world. These violent crimes are themselves now widely understood to
be the major driver of migration from the Northern Triangle countries to the United
States (Swanson & Torres, 2016), especially the subsequent waves of unaccompanied mi
nors and families with children who made up the bulk of the migrant “caravans” that the
Trump administration attempted to turn into a major moral panic during the run-up to the
2018 midterm elections in the United States. The MS-13 case is just one example of many
in the historical ways that the colonial adventures and subsequent policy initiatives (both
foreign and domestic) of destination countries in turn influenced conditions that con
tributed to outmigration in source countries (i.e., push factors).
The approach to immigration control and enforcement popularized in the United States
and being adopted incrementally in other destination countries around the globe relies
heavily on a crimmigration model borrowed from the criminal justice system: a program
of apprehensions rooted in the procedures of law enforcement; a complex of detention fa
cilities that borrow heavily from penological architecture and practices, as well as often
times relying directly on existing correctional infrastructure; a judicial process lacking
the protections (such as presumption of innocence) that guide criminal court proceed
ings; and finally deportation, which is intended to discharge the state’s responsibilities to
the human and civil rights of the immigrant as surely as execution does for the convicted
criminal.13 A rapidly building scholarly consensus holds that the social harms caused by
Page 23 of 35

this system—including (but not limited to) reduced crime reporting rates and police coop
eration, family separation, psychological trauma, loss of social capital, and public health
consequences for immigrant communities—far exceed any potential benefits to receiving
nations in terms of crime reduction, the rationale most commonly used to justify the in
vestment of public monies in immigration control (Leyro, 2017; Leyro & Stageman, 2018).
Scholars in fact theorize that crimmigration-based enforcement and control strategies
could have the opposite effect, reducing or eliminating the protective factors that con
tribute to the relatively low rates of criminal participation found in immigrant communi
ties.
There are, however, some important potential benefits that crimmigration policies
present to the native-born—in particular, to dominant racial, ethnic, and cultural groups—
in destination countries: namely, deepening the vulnerability and exploitability of immi
grant laborers and providing flexible mechanisms through which to extract financial prof
it and other benefits from the immigrants in their midst. The dehumanization and other
ing justified by attributions of criminality is reinforced in the public consciousness by the
criminal justice-based systems and structures of crimmigration that ostensibly address vi
olations of civil conduct in migration decisions, further reinforcing public beliefs that
unauthorized and undocumented migration are intrinsically criminal acts. Dehumanized
communities and individuals are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse at the
hands of bad actors, as demonstrated by the countless examples across regions and cul
tures discussed throughout this article. Further, their exploited labor has long under
pinned economic dynamics in receiving countries that are not otherwise sustainable and
arguably destructive, reliant as they are on the cheap and widely available consumer
goods and services that immigrant labor so often provides. The belief that immigrants are
inherently criminogenic contributes to the global sense that economic systems of this na
ture are fundamentally just in their punitive nature; the fact that they are not suggests
that these economic systems should be reconsidered and reformed in tandem with the in
humane immigration policies that sustain them.
Digital Resources
Cato Institute. Topics: International Economics, Development & Immigration.
International Organization for Migration. World Migration Report 2018.
Migration Policy Institute. International Migration Statistics.
Pew Research Center. Topic: Immigration.
Tonry, M. (2014). Why crime rates are falling throughout the Western World. Crime
and Justice, 43(1), 1–63.
Further Reading
Carens, J. (2013). The ethics of immigration. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Page 24 of 35

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Notes:
(1.) The official dismantling of the European colonial project in the decades following
World War II was accompanied by a range of “soft power” systems and structures intend
ed to maintain economic and diplomatic influence over the new nation-states carved out
of former colonial territories. In many cases, these structures facilitated labor migration
from the former colonies to their former European colonizers, as part of a formal effort to
address labor shortages resulting from the massive militarization, destruction of infra
structure, and loss of life that were the war’s lasting legacy. In many cases (e.g., from the
Anglophone Caribbean to the UK, from Algeria to France, from Suriname to Holland,
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etc.), official sanction and the availability of work permits combined with language ability
and the more prosaic pull factors of enhanced wages and quality of life to produce lasting
migration flows and significant, long-term resident minority populations (see, e.g.,
Bosma, Lucassen, & Oostindie, 2012; Hansen, 2003).
(2.) Yar (2012) defines social harm as “the manifold forms of harm that emerge from dom
inant patterns of social, economic, technological, and cultural practices” (p. 56), where
harm is broadly defined as the “foreclos[ure] and limit[ation of] humans’ possibilities for
being” (p. 54). The conceptual or ontological framing of this definition does not exclude
easily recognizable harms such as material deprivation, psychological trauma, physical
injury, or death; indeed, there is no more comprehensive foreclosure of a human’s possi
bility for being than death. Thus, the concept of social harm can and does encompass tra
ditional definitions of crime but may favor the examination of the social structures and
systems that surround these crimes over individual-level explanations.
(3.) This literature is voluminous and encompasses most of the works cited in the “Refer
ences.” The recent meta-analysis of Ousey and Kubrin (2018) assesses 51 representative
studies of the immigration-crime relationship undertaken between 1994 and 2014. As
such, it provides an excellent entry point into the field and serves as a valuable guide to
the relative merits of the studies under discussion.
(4.) Now thoroughly discredited in academic literature, until the 1970s cultural deficit
theory was commonly used to explain the supposed higher incidence of criminality among
African Americans, as well as racial differences in educational attainment, employment,
wealth accumulation, etc. Despite a broad and long-established consensus among schol
ars that the tenets of this theory are fundamentally racist (Persell, 1981), it continues to
feature in contemporary media and political discourse.
(5.) Reports commissioned by American anti-immigration and anti-immigrant advocacy

organizations return repeatedly to this logic and other discredited hypotheses in order to
contest the scholarly consensus that immigrants exhibit lower crime rates than native-
born residents. These reports are often presented in a manner intended to allow lay read
ers to mistake them for empirical research.
(6.) Numerous instances of this phenomenon have occurred in the United States follow
ing the election of President Donald Trump and the resulting expansion of immigration
enforcement under his administration. In particular, the fear of deportation and related
immigration consequences has driven down reporting rates for domestic violence and
sexual victimization among Latino communities with a significant population of undocu
mented/unauthorized immigrants. See, e.g., Medina (2017) and Engelbrecht (2018).
(7.) See, e.g., Brown (2016), who frames the issue as a political appeal in the mode of the
Nixonian “Southern Strategy,” or coded racial appeals to white voters intended to com
municate that the candidate deploying them will favor whites over minorities in his policy
choices.
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(8.) As the term “nationality” implies, the contemporary concept of citizenship is struc
tured by the global partition of space into modern nation-states; a nation-state’s citizens
are not simply the individuals who reside within its borders but only those residents who
can establish a legal claim to its associated patrimony. While the rationale for this legal
claim varies from one nation-state to another, citizenship status effectively establishes the
relationship between state power and the rights of the individual citizen. Without the set
of individual rights conferred by citizenship, stateless individuals are unable to establish
legal standing in their country of residence, regardless of social ties. Like undocumented
immigrants in the United States or laborers under the Kafala system, they are entirely at
the mercy of state power and consistently under threat of removal or other consequences
should they come into conflict with it. See Carens (2013).
(9.) Latin legal terminology for “law of blood,” meaning German citizenship was originally
conferred on the basis of German descent and ethnicity. This is in contrast to the Ameri
can jus solis, or “law of soil,” which confers citizenship (with very few exceptions) to any
individual born within the territorial borders of the United States.
(10.) And in fact was recognized as such by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June 27, 2019,
decision on the matter (Department of Commerce et al. v. New York et al., 2019).
(11.) The regional subheadings included in this section are organized into significant des
tination regions that feature similar source countries and patterns of migration. World Mi
gration Report 2018.
(12.) See, e.g., Martinez (2018) for more information on the high proportion of federal in
carceration driven by criminal prosecutions of immigration offenses.
(13.) Per Snider (1998), deportation bears unavoidable practical and theoretical similari
ties to the pre-modern criminal punishment of banishment, which was commonly meted
out by monarchies as a way to effectively sentence offenders to death (via starvation in
unsettled wilderness, for instance) while simultaneously showcasing “the King’s mercy.”
The parallels to contemporary insistence that “deportation is not a punishment” are hard
to ignore, as this contention allows modern governments to claim the punitive functions
of deportation (i.e., both specific and general deterrence of future instance of unautho
rized migration) without taking ethical responsibility for collateral consequences that are
often severe, up to and including the otherwise avoidable death of the deportee (Stillman,
2018).
Daniel L. Stageman
Office for the Advancement of Research, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Page 35 of 35

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Immigrants and Crime

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Immigrants and Crime

Summary and Keywords

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While the consistent portrayal and perception of immigrants as disproportionately crime-

Dynamics of Global Migration

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Figure 1. Comparative populations of foreign-born

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Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding the

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scholarly consensus on their importance as mediating factors in the relationship between

Potential Mediating Factors Tending to Increase Immigrant Crime

As noted in the section “THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 25 August 2020

Potential Mediating Factors Tending to Decrease Immigrant Crime

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assuming a significant proportion of the perpetrators of these unreported crimes are

Categories and Circumstances with Potentially

Evidence suggests that as immigrants assimilate (i.e., second- or “1.5-generation” immi­

Irregular Migration, Unauthorized and Undocumented Immigrants

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to criminalize immigrants, as the term “illegal immigrants” implies a pre-judgment of

The development of the illegal immigrant archetype—along with the development of a

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Stateless peoples are at a significantly increased risk of victimization when compared to

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 25 August 2020

Limitations on the Study of Immigrant Crimi­

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Limitations of the Available Evidence

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Figure 2. Top 20 destinations (left) and origins

Source: U.N. Department of Economic and Social Af­

Regional Overviews of the Available Evidence

Immigrants in North America

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 25 August 2020

Immigrants in Latin America and the Caribbean

Figure 3. Comparative Venezualan diaspora popula­

Source: Migration trends in the Americas

Immigrants in the United Kingdom

Anti-immigrant sentiment and perceptions of immigrant criminality among native-born

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Immigrants in Mainland Europe

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Immigrants in the Middle East

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Immigrants in Sub-Saharan Africa

Immigration to the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa is primarily internal to the continent,

Immigrants in East Asia

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Immigrants in South and Southeast Asia

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Regardless of this evidence, attributions of criminality to immigrants in Australian politi­

Overview of the Evidence on Immigrant Partici­

Evidence suggests that as immigrants assimilate (i.e., second- or “1.5-generation” immi

Limitations on the Study of Immigrant Crimi

Source: U.N. Department of Economic and Social Af

Figure 3. Comparative Venezualan diaspora popula

Regardless of this evidence, attributions of criminality to immigrants in Australian politi

Overview of the Evidence on Immigrant Partici

Anti-Defamation League. (2018, November). Mainstreaming hate: The anti-immi

Bleichmar, J. (1999). Deportation as punishment: A historical analysis of the British prac

Trujillo-Pagan, N. (2014). Emphasizing the “complex” in the “immigration industrial com

Wortley, S. (2009). Introduction. The immigration-crime connection: Competing theoreti