Crime Rates of Illegal Migrants Underreported

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Democrats actively oppose the Trump administrations efforts to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, despite the administrations focus on those with criminal histories.
To support their opposition, Democrats frequently claim, almost as an article of faith, that illegal immigrants are less prone to commit crime. "The crime rate among immigrants is far lower than the crime rate among native-born Americans," New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler asserted confidently. "So the whole issue is wrong."
"Immigrants commit crimes in this country at a rate lower than natural-born citizens," added Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. "So, if you want a safe town or a safe neighborhood, you are better off if you have immigrants."
Speaking on the Senate floor last year, Murphy added, "Whether you choose to want to believe the facts or not, that is not my decision, its your decision, but…but it is the truth."
This tenet is incessantly parroted by the legacy news media. Sample headline, this one from ABC News: "No, migrants are not driving a surge in violent crime as Trump claims." ABC asserted that crime in this country is declining despite an influx of illegal immigrants.
This barrage has achieved its intended goal: A McLaughlin & Associates survey commissioned by the Crime Prevention Research Center on April 29, 2025, reveals that 41.6% of voters believe illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens, compared to 33.3% who think otherwise.
Like most issues, U.S. public opinion on this question has a demographic and partisan component. Only men, Republicans, conservatives, whites, and those aged 41 to 55 believe illegal immigrants commit more crimes. The majority of young voters (18-29), Democrats, liberals, and African Americans most strongly assert that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes.
But is this "the truth"? Are these "the facts"?
The data suggests that the answer is pretty clearly "no."
These claims usually conflate legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants tend to follow the law, but illegal immigrants are a different story.
As to the claim that crime is falling despite a flood of illegals, it depends on whether one looks at just crimes reported to police (the FBI data) or total crime as measured by the Department of Justices Bureau of Justice Statistics. Total crime rose markedly in 2021, 2022, and 2023 (the last year it was available). This surge coincided with a massive flood of illegals. The increases shown for total crime during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any other three-year period, more than doubling the previous record.
One big problem is that the government databases are a mess in identifying illegal aliens. You can see this in terms of errors in the NICS background checks that are supposed to stop non-citizens with criminal records from buying guns.
There is more direct data linking illegals to crime. Just last year, the Biden administration admitted that 9% of the so-called "non-detained" illegals who were released into the U.S. had criminal backgrounds (662,566 out of 7.4 million released). The problem is that these were overwhelmingly those who had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border, presumably the ones we should be least concerned about. It doesnt count the 2 million "gotaways" we detected crossing the border but failed to apprehend during the Biden administration, nor the unknown millions we never saw coming across the borders. All this also depends on us believing that the Biden administration didnt undercount these criminal backgrounds. And many countries, such as Venezuela, wont provide information on the criminal backgrounds of their citizens.
Last December, a similar estimate for New York City indicated that about 7% of the illegals living there were criminals.
A prior Maricopa County Attorneys Office study revealed that illegal immigrants committed 21.8% of felonies sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court, over twice their proportion of Arizonas population. Mexican nationals alone accounted for 13% of inmates in the state prison system.
Earlier work that the Crime Prevention Research Center did for the Arizona County Prosecutors Association also found that illegals made up a disproportionate share of the Arizona prison population and that legal immigrants were more law-abiding than the general population. Illegal immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, are more likely to be classified as dangerous, and are 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens.
Critics like the Washington Post cite academic studies asserting illegal immigrants are relatively law-abiding. There are numerous problems with these studies. None of them account for changes in police, arrest, or conviction rates, or imprisonment in explaining crime rates. They look at states like California but ignore the impact on cutting crime rates from laws such as Californias 1994 three-strikes law during the period studied.
They ignore a key issue: Criminals often target those similar to themselves. Illegal immigrants, therefore, are more likely to commit crimes against other illegal immigrants. These crimes often go unreported - for fear of deportation - and as the local population of illegal immigrants grows, underreporting almost certainly increases. While these studies acknowledge that illegal immigrants who are victims hesitate to report crimes, they neglect to adjust their empirical analyses for this factor, particularly when relying on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data. Notably, the FBI data captures only about 40% of all violent crimes and 30% of all property crimes reported in the National Crime Victimization Survey.
The medias relentless narrative that illegal immigrants dont commit crimes has shaped Americans perceptions. And these numbers, as bad as they are, likely undercount the number of criminal illegals. Even if some believe undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates, ignoring ICE detainers for convicted undocumented immigrants to prevent their deportation raises doubts about whether they really care about the criminal rate of these illegal immigrants.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy in the U.S. Department of Justice during 2020-21.