Assessing the Effects of Recent Immigration on Serious Property Crime in Austin, Texas

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of recent immigration on rates of serious property crime in Austin, Texas. The foreign-born population in greater Austin has increased by more than 580 percent since 1980, and Austin is considered a "pre-emerging" immigrant gateway city to the United States, yet little attention has been directed to the relationship of recent immigration with serious property crime in such "new destinations." We examine that relationship in the unique quasi-experimental environment of Austin’s rapid and substantial growth in new immigration, ostensibly the most criminogenic of environments if the anti-immigration rhetoric is to be believed. Negative binomial regression models with corrections for spatial auto-correlation indicate that recent immigration is not associated with an increased rate of burglary, larceny, or motor vehicle theft once structural predictors of crime are controlled for. The findings are consistent with the existing literature and point to the protective effect of recent immigration on public safety. Given the cumulative weight of the evidence on immigration and crime, the rise in immigration is arguably one of the most important reasons that crime rates in general continue to decrease in the United States — and even more so in cities of immigrant concentration. The problem of crime in the United States is not "caused" or aggravated by recent immigration, but the uncritical assumption that the opposite is true persists among policymakers, the media, and the general public, thereby depriving a genuine understanding of complex phenomena — a situation that undermines the development of evidence-based, reasoned public responses to both crime and immigration.

Keywords: Immigration, crime, communities, social ecology, social disorganization