Illegal Immigrant Crime Rate Compared to Native-Born Americans

The illegal immigrant crime rate compared to native-born Americans is lower across nearly every category researchers have been able to measure. Peer-reviewed studies of Texas arrest records, 50-state longitudinal data, 150 years of Census incarceration figures, and American Community Survey estimates all point the same direction: undocumented immigrants are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated at lower rates than people born in the United States. Dissenting studies exist, but the ones most often cited have drawn serious methodological criticism.

What the Texas Arrest Data Shows

The most-cited individual-level study on this question came out of Texas, which is the only state that systematically tracks the immigration status of people arrested and convicted using the Department of Homeland Security’s IDENT biometric database.¹ Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, the study by Michael T. Light, Jingying He, and Jason P. Robey covered felony arrests from 2012 through 2018 and found that undocumented immigrants had “substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.”²

The specifics:

Native-born citizens were over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes.
They were 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes.
They were over four times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
Undocumented immigrants were roughly half as likely to be arrested for homicide, sexual assault, and felonious assault.²

The results held up when researchers swapped in alternative population estimates from the Pew Research Center and when they substituted conviction data for arrest data.²

A broader analysis published in Criminology in 2018 by Light and Ty Miller looked at all 50 states and Washington, D.C., from 1990 through 2014. Using FBI Uniform Crime Reports and fixed-effects regression, the authors found that increases in the undocumented population did not drive violent crime up. If anything, the relationship was “generally negative, although not significant in all specifications.” Over that stretch, the undocumented population more than tripled, from 3.5 million to 11.3 million, while violent crime fell nationally.³

A 2024 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky and co-authors stretched the timeline out to 150 years. Looking at incarceration data from 1870 through 2020, the authors found immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the native-born for the entire period. As of 2020, immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than all U.S.-born individuals and 30 percent less likely than U.S.-born white individuals. The gap has widened since 1960 and holds for immigrants from every world region.⁴

Incarceration Rates Side by Side

The Cato Institute has produced regular estimates using American Community Survey data. Its 2010–2024 analysis found that in 2024 the incarceration rate per 100,000 people aged 18 to 54 was:

1,195 for native-born Americans
674 for undocumented immigrants
303 for legal immigrants⁵

That makes undocumented immigrants about 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than the native-born, and legal immigrants about 75 percent less likely. The undocumented figure also includes people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for civil immigration violations, not criminal offenses. Strip those detainees out and the rate drops to 356 per 100,000, closer to the legal immigrant number and less than a third of the native-born rate.⁵

The same analysis found that in every racial and ethnic category, both legal and illegal immigrants had lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans of the same race or ethnicity. The undocumented rate did climb between 2022 (538 per 100,000) and 2024 (674), a 25 percent jump, but it stayed well below the native-born figure.⁵

Homicide in Texas

Homicide is the most reliably recorded crime and the one most often invoked in political debate, so it deserves its own look. A 2024 Cato study of Texas homicide convictions from 2013 through 2022 found:

Undocumented immigrants: 2.2 convictions per 100,000 residents
Native-born Americans: 3.0 per 100,000
Legal immigrants: 1.2 per 100,000⁶

Undocumented immigrants were 26 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide; legal immigrants were 61 percent less likely. The gap was wider in 2022 alone, with 3.1 convictions per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants versus 4.9 for native-born Americans.⁶

The Federal Prison Statistic That Gets Misread

A common counterargument is that noncitizens make up a disproportionate share of federal prisoners. According to U.S. Sentencing Commission data for fiscal year 2024, non-U.S. citizens accounted for 34.7 percent of federal sentences.⁷ That number is real, but it reflects what the federal system prosecutes rather than any broader pattern of criminal behavior.

Immigration violations accounted for 72.3 percent of the federal offenses for which non-U.S. citizens were sentenced, versus just 7.1 percent for U.S. citizens. The federal system prosecutes offenses like illegal reentry and visa fraud that only noncitizens can commit by definition. U.S. citizens sentenced in federal court were there mainly for drug trafficking (36.9 percent) and firearms offenses (19.9 percent). More than half of non-U.S. citizens sentenced federally (52.7 percent) had little or no prior criminal history, and their average sentence of 26 months was far shorter than the 69-month average for U.S. citizens.⁷

A Bureau of Justice Statistics report confirmed the pattern: in 2018, about 86 percent of undocumented noncitizens charged in federal district courts were charged with immigration offenses.⁸ When traditional crimes are isolated, the direction reverses. U.S.-born citizens were five times more likely to be incarcerated for violent offenses, more than twice as likely for property crimes, and nearly twice as likely for drug offenses compared to immigrants.¹

The Studies That Reach the Opposite Conclusion

Not every analysis points the same way. The most prominent outlier is a 2018 paper by John R. Lott Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center, which examined Arizona Department of Corrections prison admissions from 1985 through 2017. Lott concluded that undocumented immigrants were at least 142 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans, committed more serious offenses, served longer sentences, and were 45 percent more likely to be classified as gang members.⁹

The study drew pointed criticism. Lott identified undocumented immigrants using an Arizona corrections variable labeled “non-US citizen and deportable” and treated it as synonymous with illegal status. The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh argued that was a misclassification: the same category also includes legal permanent residents who committed deportable offenses, a group that accounts for roughly 10 percent of annual deportations nationally. Using a different variable from the same Arizona dataset — one flagging individuals with ICE detainers — Nowrasteh calculated the actual share of illegal immigrant prison admissions at a maximum of 4.3 percent, well below Lott’s 11.1 percent figure for 2014.¹⁰ The PNAS authors noted that neither Lott’s analysis nor the Cato Institute’s earlier work was peer-reviewed at the time of their publication.²

The Federation for American Immigration Reform has also argued for higher illegal immigrant crime rates, using data from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which reimburses state and local governments for incarcerating certain undocumented immigrants. FAIR focused on ten states and concluded that illegal immigrants were incarcerated at up to 5.5 times the rate of citizens.¹¹ Critics challenged FAIR’s methodology for lacking a reliable denominator (there is no official count of the undocumented population for direct comparison), for potential double-counting, and for not accounting for how prisoners flow through the system over the course of a year.¹²

Why the Numbers Are Genuinely Hard to Pin Down

The United States does not have a straightforward system for tracking crime by immigration status. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, the National Crime Victimization Survey, and the National Incident-Based Reporting System do not record whether a person is a citizen, legal resident, or undocumented.² Most state corrections departments do not collect it systematically either; Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma are identified as the major exceptions.⁵

Studies that rely on Census or American Community Survey data use what is called a residual method. Researchers classify foreign-born respondents as legal immigrants if they show markers like citizenship, military service, government employment, or benefit receipt, and treat the remainder as undocumented. This can misclassify some legal residents (such as those on student or work visas) as undocumented, which can inflate the undocumented population and make its crime rate look lower than it is.¹³ Estimating the total undocumented population — the denominator in any per-capita rate — adds further uncertainty, since figures from Pew Research Center, the Center for Migration Studies, and DHS diverge.²

Even IDENT, the biometric database behind the Texas studies, has been questioned. In Gonzalez v. ICE, a federal district court in California found in 2019 that ICE databases “often contain incomplete data, significant errors,” and sometimes fail to reflect updated citizenship status, with internal emails acknowledging that misidentification of U.S. citizens as removable “occur[s] frequently.”¹⁴ A Ninth Circuit panel reversed and vacated the district court’s database injunction in 2020, finding the lower court had not adequately assessed overall reliability or whether “systemic error” existed.¹⁵

Did Crime Rise With the 2021–2024 Migration Surge?

The sharp increase in border crossings from 2021 through 2024 produced a real-world test. If undocumented immigrants were driving crime, cities taking in large numbers of new arrivals should have seen it climb. The Migration Policy Institute noted that border states and “many interior cities that have received large numbers of recent arrivals” showed an “overall downtrend in criminal activity year over year,” while cautioning that more research would be needed to isolate the role of recent arrivals.¹

Major Cities Chiefs Association data for cities that received significant migrant populations shows the drop. New York City reported 263 homicides in 2025 versus 361 in 2024, with robbery falling from 16,557 to 14,969 and aggravated assault from 38,625 to 37,850. Chicago homicides fell from 587 to 417 and robberies from 9,127 to 5,829. Denver homicides dropped from 70 to 37.¹⁶ Those figures do not isolate immigration from every other factor, but they are hard to square with the idea that new arrivals produced citywide crime surges.

Where the Evidence Lands

None of this means undocumented immigrants never commit crimes. They do, and some of those crimes are violent and devastating. The research question is whether the group as a whole offends at a higher, similar, or lower rate than native-born Americans. On that question, the Texas arrest study, the 50-state longitudinal analysis, the 150-year incarceration series, the Cato ACS estimates, and the Texas homicide conviction data all point to lower rates for the undocumented population. The dissenting studies have faced substantial methodological criticism, mainly over how they identify undocumented individuals in administrative datasets. The debate persists in large part because most of the country still does not track crime by immigration status, and the political weight of the question runs well ahead of the data systems meant to answer it.

1
Migration Policy Institute. Immigrants and Crime
2
PNAS. Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-Born US Citizens in Texas
3
National Library of Medicine. Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?
4
National Bureau of Economic Research. Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-Born, 1870–2020
5
Cato Institute. Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010–2024
6
Cato Institute. New Cato Research Shows Illegal Immigrants Are Less Likely to Be Convicted of Murder in Texas
7
U.S. Sentencing Commission. Federally Sentenced Non-US Citizens
8
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Non-US Citizens in the Federal Criminal Justice System, 1998–2018
9
Crime Prevention Research Center. The Impact of Illegal Aliens on Crime Rates
10
Cato Institute. Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr.’s Study on Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona
11
FAIR. SCAAP Data: Illegal Aliens Have Higher Crime Rate
12
Cato Institute. FAIR SCAAP Crime Report Has Many Serious Problems
13
ResearchGate. On the Association Between Undocumented Immigration and Crime in the United States
14
ACLU SoCal. Gonzalez v. ICE, No. 2:12-cv-09012-AB
15
Justia. Gonzalez v. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, No. 20-55175
16
Major Cities Chiefs Association. Violent Crime Survey – 2025 and 2024 Year-End