Throughout three days of the Republican National Convention, officials highlighted a surge in what they call “migrant crime.” President Biden “has welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists, and the price that we have paid has been deadly,” said Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Every day, Americans are dying” in crimes committed by migrants. Donald Trump has made similar remarks on the campaign trail. There is no migrant crime surge, says the New York Times. In fact, U.S. rates of crime and immigration have moved in opposite directions in recent years. After illegal immigration plummeted in 2020, the murder rate rose. After illegal immigration spiked in 2021 and 2022, murders plateaued and then fell. Over a longer period, there is no relationship between immigration and crime trends. The number of foreign-born Americans has increased for decades, while the murder rate has gone up and down at different times.
Some migrants have committed violent crimes. There are more than 45 million immigrants in the U.S., and invariably some of them — just like people of any other group — do bad things. Similarly, thousands of native-born Americans commit violent crimes in any given week. Trump and other Republicans have suggested that immigrants are especially likely to be criminals. They point to a few anecdotes. The data show the opposite: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. There are genuine issues with the border and illegal immigration, but more crime is not one of them. If more immigration led to more crime, you would expect that crime rates would spike along with immigration flows, locally and nationally. The statistics would show that migrants were disproportionately likely to commit criminal or violent acts. Instead, the opposite is true. New York, Chicago and Denver have had an influx of immigrants in recent years. Over that same period, murder totals in those cities have fallen. Similarly, border counties in Texas have lower violent crime rates than the state and country overall, says crime analyst Jeff Asher. The individual crimes committed by migrants that Trump and his allies highlight do not add up to a bigger trend.