Immigration Related Offenses

Immigration and crime refers to perceived or actual relationships between criminal activity and immigration.

Research suggests that people tend to overestimate the relationship between immigration and criminality,^[1][2][3] and that the media tends to erroneously depict immigrants as particularly crime-prone.^[4] The academic literature provides mixed findings for the relationship between immigration and crime worldwide, but finds for the United States that immigration either has no impact on the crime rate or that it reduces the crime rate.^{[5][6][7][2][8][9][10]} A meta-analysis of 51 studies from 1994–2014 on the relationship between immigration and crime in the United States found that overall immigration reduces crime, but the relationship is very weak.^[11]

The over-representation of immigrants in the criminal justice systems of several countries may be due to socioeconomic factors, imprisonment for migration offenses, and racial and ethnic discrimination by police and the judicial system.^{[12][13][14][15][16][17]} The relationship between immigration and terrorism is understudied, but existing research suggests that the relationship is weak and that repression of the immigrants increases the terror risk.^[18][19][20] Research on the relationship between refugee migration and crime is scarce, but existing empirical evidence fails to substantiate a relationship between refugee migration and crime.^[21]

See Harris' success story about immigration