Assessing the Macro-Level Relationship between Immigration and Crime Rates: A Meta-Analysis

• In Event: Diffusion, Contagion, Immigration, and More: What’s New in the Study of Macro Criminology?

Abstract

This study seeks to build deeper understanding of the macro-level relationship between immigration and crime rates. Extant research offers contradicting ideas regarding this relationship and available "state of the art" narrative reviews are limited by a reliance on the subjective evaluation of one or a few criminological experts. In this study, we provide an alternative means to assess what is known about the immigration-crime nexus: a systematic meta-analysis of prior quantitative studies. Based on an analysis of nearly 600 effect size estimates from roughly sixty quantitative empirical studies, our goal is to answer several key questions including: 1) What is the average association between quantitative measures of immigration and crime rates? 2) How much do estimates of this relationship vary between studies? 3) How do salient characteristics of the studies—sample characteristics, geographic locations, time-periods, units of analysis, statistical estimators, model specifications—affect and explain variations in the immigration-crime association across available studies? Important theoretical and methodological implications for research on the macro-level link between immigration and crime are discussed.

Authors

• Graham Ousey, College of William & Mary

• Charis Kubrin, University of California, Irvine