Checked 18 August 2026
We checked
Claim: Immigrants commit more crime than people born in the US
No — multiple independent data sources (National Academies review, incarceration rates, a peer-reviewed Texas study) consistently find immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crime at lower rates than US-born citizens. This is a settled empirical finding, not just an unresolved concern behind the question.
Claim: Immigrants commit more crime than people born in the US
No — the evidence is against itDecades of research using arrest, conviction, and incarceration data consistently find the opposite: the National Academies of Sciences' own review found that neighborhoods with more immigrants have lower crime and violence, and foreign-born men aged 18-39 are incarcerated at about a quarter the rate of native-born men, while a peer-reviewed Texas study found undocumented immigrants had considerably lower felony arrest rates than native-born citizens.
ReferencesThe U.S. Immigration (Dillingham) Commission investigated the link and concluded, per a later summary, that "no satisfactory evidence has yet been produced to show that immigration has resulted in an increase in crime disproportionate to the increase in the adult population" even as the same commiss
The National Commission of Law and Enforcement (Wickersham Commission) noted the crime-immigration theory was already old, writing that the idea 'is a theory that is almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast.'
Economists Kristin Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl used 1980 and 1990 Census data and found recent immigrant cohorts were less likely to be involved in criminal activity than earlier immigrants and the native-born.
A PNAS study used newly available Texas arrest records (2012–2018) that could distinguish undocumented from documented immigrants, finding undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than both native-born citizens and legal immigrants.
A National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzed Census data back to 1870 and found immigrant incarceration rates have been similar to or lower than U.S.-born rates for the entire period, with the gap widening in recent decades to roughly 60 percent lower.
The claim that immigrants commit more crime than the native-born is a recurring belief in U.S. political and media discourse, not a finding from research; the empirical record has run the opposite direction for well over a century. A 1931 federal crime commission already described the theory as old, and modern data — most recently a 150-year Census-based study and a Texas arrest-records study — consistently show immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are incarcerated and arrested at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens.
ReferencesReviewed 1 October 2026 — nothing had changed.
Claims on this page are re-checked periodically; any change of finding is reviewed by a person before it appears here.