Crime and Immigration: Evidence from Large Immigrant Waves

By Brian Bell, Francesco Fasani, Stephen Machin. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper focuses on empirical connections between crime and immigration, studying two large waves of recent U.K. immigration (the late 1990s/early 2000s asylum seekers and the post-2004 inflow from EU accession countries). The first wave led to a modest but significant rise in property crime, while the second wave had a small negative impact. There was no effect on violent crime; arrest rates were not different, and changes in crime cannot be ascribed to crimes against immigrants. The findings are consistent with the notion that differences in labor market opportunities of different migrant groups shape their potential impact on crime.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48526aefe146d8cc528708b74fbc9fcc13904e19

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of Immigrant Legalization on Crime: The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (2014, unknown): “Column (3) reports IV results over all counties and including all instruments.”
On the Economics and Politics of Refugee Migration (2017, unknown): “The UK and Ireland also continue to disperse asylum seekers under policies introduced in 2000 (Bell et al., 2013).”
Non-Native Speakers of English in the Classroom: What are the Effects on Pupil Performance? (2012, unknown): “It has been used to analyse the effects on crime by Bell et al. (2010).”
Immigration, Trade and Productivity in Services: Evidence from U.K. Firms (2018, unknown): “…by Altonji and Card (1991) and Card (2001) which was then used in several papers exploiting the variation of immigrants across U.S. regions (e.g. Card and DiNardo, 2000; Ottaviano and Peri, 2006; Peri and Sparber, 2009) and in the U.K. (e.g. Dustmann, Frattini and Preston, 2013; Bell et al, 2013).”
(The Struggle for) Refugee Integration into the Labour Market: Evidence from Europe (2018, background): “Other papers have exploited these allocation policies to identify causal impacts on different outcomes, such as crime (Bell et al. 2013; Damm and Dustmann 2014; Couttenier et al. 2019) or politics (Dustmann et al. 2019; Bratsberg et al. forthcoming).”
Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK (2016, background): “Bell et al (2013) find no effect of the big 2004 increase in immigration from East European countries on crime.”
Clicking on heaven's door: the effect of immigrant legalization on crime (2017, methodology): “(2005) and Bertrand et al. (2010) run a battery of regressions of treatment assignment on a dummy that equals 1 after each possible cutoff point and choose the one that maximizes the R(2) of the regression.”
Consequences of forced migration: A survey of recent findings (2019, background): “Bell et al. (2013) look at the effect on crime of two migration waves to the UK: asylum seekers coming to the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and economic migrants from Eastern Europe arriving after EU enlargement in 2004.”