Immigration Enforcement and Crime

Setting aside the heated politics of immigration, much of the policy debate surrounding immigration reform simply assumes that immigration enforcement reduces crime rates. This central assumption, however, does not benefit from much data. In their paper, Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from 'Secure Communities', Tom Miles (Chicago) and Adam Cox (NYU), bring much-needed data to this research question, exploit a natural experiment created by the Secure Communities program, and "provide the first empirical analysis of the most important deportation initiative to be rolled out in decades." What they find is that the Secure Communities program has led to "no meaningful reductions in the FBI index crime rate. Nor has it reduced rates of violent crime — homicide, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault. This evidence shows that the program has not served its central objective of making communities safer."