Experts Warn Mass Deportations Likely to Increase Crime Rate — Not Reduce It

The political promise sounds simple enough: remove every immigrant who lacks legal status and America will be safer.

But what happens if you actually take that premise seriously, plug it into what we know about crime, and run the numbers forward?

A growing body of research suggests the United States may be sleepwalking into the opposite result—that a mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants could raise the risk of crime for everyone left behind. Not because immigrants are secretly more dangerous, but precisely because, on average, they are less likely to commit crimes and, in many contexts, more likely to be targeted by offenders who see them as safe victims.

In other words, if you rip out millions of relatively law-abiding neighbors—many of whom currently absorb victimization that never reaches the police—you don’t erase criminal intent. You redirect it.

What the data actually say about immigrants and crime

For decades, the politics of immigration have leaned on a simple narrative: more “illegal aliens” equals more crime. The research record, from red states and blue states alike, says otherwise.

• A 2024 analysis by the American Immigration Council, covering 1980–2022, found that as the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled (from 6.2% to 13.9%), the overall crime rate fell by about 60%, from roughly 5,900 to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people. American Immigration Council

• Multiple studies using Texas Department of Public Safety data—a rare state that tracks immigration status in criminal records—consistently show that both legal and undocumented immigrants have lower conviction rates than native-born Americans. In 2018, the criminal conviction rate for undocumented immigrants in Texas was about 45% lower than for native-born Texans; homicide conviction rates for undocumented immigrants were also significantly below those of U.S.-born citizens. Cato Institute

• A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared crime rates among undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born residents and again found that undocumented immigrants were lesslikely to be arrested for serious offenses than U.S.-born citizens. PNAS

• At a macro level, a widely cited longitudinal analysis of all 50 states from 1990 to 2014 found that increases in undocumented immigration did not increase violent crime. If anything, states that saw larger rises in undocumented populations did slightly better on violence trends once other factors were accounted for. PMC

• Recent estimates of incarceration rates show a similar pattern: undocumented immigrants are incarcerated at significantly lower rates than native-born Americans, a finding that aligns with a larger literature showing no “ immigrant crime wave” even in periods of high migration. Cato Institute

Taken together, the evidence points to a broad consensus among criminologists and social scientists: immigrants—including those here without authorization—tend to be more law-abiding than native-born Americans, not less.

That’s the starting point for understanding why mass removals could make the United States more dangerous, not safer.

The composition problem: deporting a low-crime group

When policymakers talk about removing “all illegal immigrants,” they rarely say this out loud, but mathematically they’re proposing to shrink a relatively low-crime segment of the population while leaving high-crime segments untouched.

If undocumented immigrants are, say, 30–50% less likely to be convicted of crimes than native-born citizens in a given jurisdiction, as Texas data suggest, then forcibly shrinking that group does not remove a proportional share of crime. It removes a smaller share of offenders than their share of the population. The remaining population is, by definition, more crime-prone on average.

Criminologists sometimes call this a composition effect: when you alter who lives in a community, you change its risk profile. If you deport millions of relatively low-risk people, the average risk among those who remain goes up, even if no individual becomes more violent overnight.

This is the first way mass deportations can backfire: by quietly nudging the baseline risk in the wrong direction.

The victim puzzle: when targets vanish, crime doesn’t

The second, less intuitive dynamic involves victimization.

National Crime Victimization Survey research shows that immigrants overall tend to have lower measured victimization rates than U.S.-born citizens, partly because they are older, more likely to be employed, and more likely to live in family households—patterns that keep them away from some high-risk situations. PMC

But within the immigrant population, especially among those without citizenship or legal status, scholars have documented a different reality: they are often especially attractive targets for certain crimes—wage theft, robbery, extortion, intimate partner violence, and exploitation by employers or smugglers. PMC

Why?

• Undocumented immigrants are more likely to work in cash-based, low-wage sectors.

• They may live in more precarious housing situations with less formal protection.

• They are routinely told—sometimes accurately—that contacting the police could expose them or their loved ones to immigration enforcement. PMC

Offenders know this. Interviews with both perpetrators and law enforcement show that people perceived as unlikely to report crimes are prime targets, precisely because they’re seen as “safe” victims. PMC

Immigrants, in other words, often function as buffer victims: they absorb a portion of the criminal victimization that would otherwise fall on other groups, especially in neighborhoods where criminal activity is already present.

Deport them, and you haven’t eliminated predators. You’ve removed a set of targets those predators relied on. Unless you believe their criminal impulses vanish at the border, those offenses will find new victims—neighbors, coworkers, or other vulnerable residents who remain.

Reporting, trust, and the dark figure of crime

A third piece of the puzzle is what criminologists call the “dark figure” of crime: the large share of offenses that never get reported to police.

There’s evidence that immigrant communities, especially when they feel relatively secure from deportation, can actually improve public safety by lowering that dark figure. A recent analysis by the Cato Institute found that immigrants are significantly less likely to be victims of violent crime than U.S.-born residents, in part because they often live in dense, socially cohesive communities that provide informal protection—and that immigrants can boost crime reporting when they trust authorities. Cato Institute

Other research shows that first-generation immigrants are often more likely to report serious violent victimizations than second- or third-generation residents, contradicting the stereotype of an immigrant community that uniformly “won’t call the cops.” Office of Justice Programs

But this is highly sensitive to policy. When immigration enforcement is aggressive, visible, and intertwined with local policing, reporting drops. Recent policy shifts that strip protections from undocumented crime victims—such as the rollback of some safeguards for U-visa applicants—have already led to fewer victims coming forward and more cases where key witnesses are detained or deported. AP News

A mass-deportation regime would supercharge those dynamics:

• Witnesses disappear. Victims and bystanders who could help solve crimes—or prevent retaliatory violence—are removed from the country.

• Offenders learn the lesson. If criminals see that attacking immigrants carries little risk of reports or investigations, they have every incentive to keep targeting those communities and others who seem similarly vulnerable.

• Entire neighborhoods “go dark.” When trust erodes, people stop calling the police, creating pockets where crimes multiply under the radar until they spill over more visibly into the wider community.

Empirically, jurisdictions that have adopted “sanctuary” policies limiting local collaboration with federal immigration enforcement have not seen the crime explosions critics predicted; some research finds small reductions in certain crimes, likely because immigrants in those areas are more willing to cooperate with police. Cato Institute

Swap sanctuary for mass removal, and you risk flipping that logic.

Economic shock therapy—and its side effects

Crime is not just about policing and punishment; it’s also about economics.

Immigrants are disproportionately represented in key sectors of the U.S. labor market—agriculture, construction, elder care, hospitality, food processing—that are physically demanding, often low-paying, and increasingly shunned by native-born workers. A large body of economic research, summarized by the National Academies and others, finds that immigration overall is a net positive for U.S. economic growth, innovation, and long-term fiscal health. migrationpolicy.org

Remove several million workers in a short period and you don’t just create labor shortages; you create a shock that ripples outward:

• Businesses may close or cut hours, throwing native-born employees out of work.

• Rents and mortgages go unpaid in neighborhoods where immigrants are core tenants.

• Local tax revenues fall, straining schools, youth programs, and social services that help keep crime down.

Criminologists have repeatedly found that spikes in unemployment, especially among young men and in already disadvantaged communities, are associated with higher rates of certain crimes, particularly property crime and some forms of violence.

Mass deportations, in other words, are not just a border policy. They’re a destabilizing domestic economic experiment with predictable side effects.

What experts actually predict

No one can run a controlled experiment in which a country deported every undocumented immigrant and then measured the crime rate afterwards. Predictions about such an extreme scenario are necessarily probabilistic.

But when researchers who study immigration and crime are asked to think through the likely consequences of large-scale removals, a common set of themes emerges from the evidence:

1. You lose a net protective population. A group that is less likely to commit crimes and, in many settings, contributes to stronger community networks and lower neighborhood crime is shrunk or eliminated. American Immigration Council

2. You don’t eliminate criminal intent. Offenders adapt to the new landscape, shifting to new victims and opportunities. The crimes that used to fall on undocumented immigrants don’t vanish; they are redirected.

3. You deepen underreporting and weaken investigations. Communities that fear law enforcement are less likely to cooperate, meaning more offenses go unsolved—and more serial offenders remain free. PMC

4. You introduce economic and social shocks that historically correlate with higher crime, not lower.

Put plainly: if you design a policy in the name of “public safety” that removes a relatively low-crime population, erodes trust in law enforcement, creates new economic hardships, and hands criminals a more fearful, less protected set of neighbors to prey on, you shouldn’t expect safer streets at the end of it.

You should expect the opposite.

Politics, fear, and the stories we tell

None of this has stopped politicians and media outlets from amplifying horrific individual crimes committed by undocumented immigrants as proof of a broader “migrant crime wave.” The Brennan Center for Justice and others have documented how a handful of high-profile incidents are repeatedly used to stoke fear, despite longstanding evidence that immigrants as a group are less likely to commit crimes than native-born residents. Brennan Center for Justice

It’s not that those crimes don’t matter—they do, enormously, to the victims and their families. The question is what policies will actually make such tragedies less likely, rather than simply offering a narrative that feels tough but leaves everyone more exposed.

So far, the empirical record points away from mass removal and toward a quieter, less dramatic recipe:

• Stable legal status.

• Stronger labor protections to reduce exploitation.

• Clear separation between local policing and federal immigration enforcement to encourage reporting.

• Investments in communities where both immigrants and native-born residents live and work side by side.

These are not the slogans that fit easily on campaign hats. But they are the ingredients that researchers, looking back over four decades of data, associate with safer cities and towns.

The uncomfortable bottom line

If you take the data seriously, mass deportation starts to look less like a crime-fighting strategy and more like a crime-redistribution program—one that pushes victimization off the ledger of a politically vilified group and onto the shoulders of the people who remain.

You might succeed in deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. What you won’t deport are desperation, greed, and violence. Those stay here.

And unless we’re honest about where crime actually comes from—and about the quiet ways immigrants have helped hold some of that danger at bay—we may discover too late that in the name of “law and order,” we dismantled one of the country’s underrated public-safety assets: the immigrant communities that, day after day, have helped make their adopted neighborhoods safer than the rhetoric suggests.