A massive new first-of-its-kind study zooms into the neighborhood level
9:00 AM CDT on August 12, 2026
Immigration and crime weren’t the biggest issues in the 2024 presidential election (it was the economy, stupid), but they were in the top five, according to a Pew survey. Unsurprisingly, Trump voters rated both issues higher than Harris voters, and combining the two (with a healthy dose of demagoguery) proved to be enough to sweep Trump into the White House for a second term. Now a new large-scale study published in the Journal of Urban Affairs shows no link between unauthorized immigration and crime—with a little bit of a twist.
Combing through crime statistics spanning a decade from 11,500 neighborhoods, a team led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine found no evidence that an increase in unauthorized immigration drove up crime. In fact, the neighborhoods that saw the largest growth in the population of undocumented immigrants actually saw greater reductions in property crime and aggravated assaults.
“Consistent with the research base more generally, unauthorized immigration doesn’t drive crime rates in U.S. neighborhoods,” study author Charis E. Kubrin of UC Irvine said in a statement. “Honestly, I wasn’t too surprised.”
