Does Immigration Increase Crime?

"Butcher and Piehl (1998) provide the first systematic economic analysis of immigration and crime rates, showing that immigration did not lead to a significant increase in crime across U.S.cities over the period 1980-1990. Reid et al.(2005) and Wadsworth (2010) reach the same conclusion when looking at more recent periods. Moving to European countries, Bianchi et al.(2012) conclude that immigration did not increased crime across Italian provinces, while Alonso-Borrego et al.(2012) estimate a positive relationship between immigration and crime in Spain. Finally, Bell et al.(2013) focus on two large waves of recent UK immigration, namely the late 1990s /early 2000s asylum seekers and the post-2004 inflow from EU accession countries, respectively. They find that only in the former case there was a significant increase in (property) crimes. Legal status may profoundly affect criminal behaviour by changing the relative payoffs of legitimate and illegitimate activities. In most destination countries, legal status is a prerequisite for working in the official economy. Therefore, undocumented immigrants are excluded from legitimate economic activities or they may be able to work just in the shadow economy. In either case, they would face worse (legitimate) income opportunities compared to legal immigrants and thus a lower opportunity cost of crime. In spite of the importance of the relationship between immigration police and crime for the debate on immigration reforms currently taking place in the United States as well as in many European countries, there is very little empirical evidence on this topic"--