"Immigrants commit more crime" is one of the most common claims in this debate — we take on the broad version of it directly in our companion fact-check of that exact claim — and it's one of the hardest to check well, because most available numbers don't actually let you compare like with like. ICE arrest totals describe who ICE chose to arrest, not a crime rate. Comparing that count to the entire U.S. population and calling the result a "rate" is a statistical error we explain in detail in the next piece in this series. This piece instead looks at the research that was actually built to make a fair comparison — and at the real methodological argument over whether it succeeded.
The Study Built to Answer This Question
Documented fact: In 2020, criminologists Michael Light, Jingying He, and Jason Robey published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using arrest records from the Texas Department of Public Safety — one of the few state systems that lets researchers separately identify undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born U.S. citizens in the same dataset. They examined 2012 through 2018.
The Texas State Capitol
Texas is one of the only states whose criminal-justice data lets researchers separately identify undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born citizens in the same arrest records — which is exactly why this debate keeps coming back to Texas. Photo: Daniel Mayer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Documented fact: Their headline findings, relative to undocumented immigrants: U.S.-born citizens were more than 2 times as likely to be arrested for violent crime, 2.5 times as likely for drug crimes, and more than 4 times as likely to be arrested for property crimes. Comparing immigrants overall (including undocumented) to native-born citizens, immigrants were arrested for violent crime at about half the per-capita rate, for drug offenses at about 40%, and for theft/property crime at about 25%. The authors reported these findings held up under several robustness checks — different population estimates, different ways of classifying undocumented status, and substituting convictions for arrests as the measure.
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The Real Methodological Dispute
Allegation / disputed claim: In 2022, researchers Sean Kennedy, Jason Richwine, and Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies published a rebuttal, "Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality." Their core argument is not that the Texas DPS data is fake, but that it takes Texas authorities time — sometimes years — to confirm someone's immigration status while they're in custody, and that offenders who are eventually identified as undocumented can get misclassified as native-born in the interim, which they argue undercounts undocumented crime and overstates the gap.
Response / counter-analysis: Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute responded directly to that critique, arguing the CIS authors made errors in their own recalculation — specifically, overestimating the number of undocumented offenders (the numerator) while underestimating the size of the undocumented population used to calculate the rate (the denominator), which would artificially inflate the undocumented crime rate their critique produced. Separately, Cato's own analysis of Texas homicide conviction data from 2013 to 2022 found a homicide conviction rate of 2.2 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants versus 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans over the same period — consistent with the original study's direction of the finding, using a different, more serious offense category and a longer time span.
Interpretation: This is a live, technical dispute between researchers about data lag and classification timing, not a disagreement about whether crime happens. Both sides agree the Texas DPS data is the right starting point; they disagree about how to correct for a specific classification-timing problem within it. We're not in a position to referee that dispute ourselves — both critiques are published, both are attributable, and readers evaluating the underlying claim should know the argument exists rather than assume the original finding is uncontested.
A Demonstration Against ICE, Minneapolis, January 2026
The "immigrants commit more crime" narrative is exactly the kind of claim that drives crowds like this one into the street — and it's exactly the kind of claim this research was built to actually test. Photo: Fibonacci Blue, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What This Study Can't Tell You
Interpretation: Even taken at face value, this is Texas-specific data from 2012–2018 (or 2013–2022 for the homicide-specific analysis). It is not nationwide, and it is not current to 2026. Texas has its own enforcement patterns, demographics, and reporting practices that may not generalize to other states. Any claim that extends findings like these to "immigrants nationwide today" is going beyond what this specific research actually measured.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why use Texas data instead of national data?
Because Texas is one of the few states whose criminal-justice data can separately identify undocumented immigration status at the individual arrest-record level, which most national datasets cannot do reliably. That specificity is also the source of its limitation: it's one state's data, not the country's.
Does this settle the debate over immigrant crime rates?
No single study does. This is the most methodologically ambitious comparison available with a genuine three-way population breakdown, but it has been directly challenged on a specific technical point, and that challenge has itself been disputed. Treat it as the best available evidence on this specific question, not as a final word.
Does "arrested more often" mean "commits more crime"?
Not necessarily — arrest rates reflect both underlying offending and how heavily a given population is policed. This is a real limitation of arrest-based comparisons in general, including this one, and worth keeping in mind when reading any crime-rate claim based on arrest data rather than victimization surveys.
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Related Reading
The Claim That "Immigrants Commit More Crime": our direct fact-check of the broader claim this piece's Texas research is used to support or dispute.
The Denominator Problem: explains exactly why comparing ICE arrest totals to the general population produces a meaningless "rate," and why the Texas three-way comparison avoids that trap.
"Obama Did the Same Thing" Claim: a related look at how enforcement-era comparisons get used selectively across administrations.
Sources: Light, M., He, J., & Robey, J.P., "Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; Kennedy, S., Richwine, J., & Camarota, S.A., "Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality," Center for Immigration Studies, Oct. 2022; Nowrasteh, A., "Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022," Cato Institute.
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