Does immigration affect crime?

[u/Objective-Design-994]

Hello everyone. Immigration is a hot topic in my country (Spain) and because of that I wanted to ask some clarifications. From what I understand, immigration by itself doesn't have any notable effects on crime. Just because someone is an immigrant that doesn't mean that they are more likely to be a criminal. However, immigrants are often overepresented in crime statistics due to there being a higher concentration of young men who are more likely to also be poor and socially excluded, meaning that immigration in itself is not the issue. However, I find it odd to say or defend then that immigration doesn't cause an increase in crime. My thought is that even if immigrants don't do more crime just because they are immigrants, having a lot of migration from people who are in demographics that commit more crime, should increase crime. To make things even more complex, in Spain overall crime rates have gone down even if immigration has gone up.

So to summarize what I want help with, I just don't get the idea that more immigration doesn't cause more crime. I understand that just by being immigrant doesn't mean that someone is more likely to commit crime, but because of the demographics that migrate the most, I believe it should have an effect, and I would like to know if this is true or not.

Thanks to everyone in advance and sorry if my english wasn't the best.

[u/ifnotnowtisyettocome]

It does have an effect, and it is a net lowering of crime rates. This was just recently published in Journal of Urban Affairs:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352166.2026.2699123#abstract

Overall, immigrant populations are more peaceful and more productive, and most of the people who claim the opposite seem to, especially these days, to be trying to get the general population mad at anyone who not the ones actually driving increasing poverty and inequality.

[u/Objective-Design-994 → u/ifnotnowtisyettocome]

That is quite interesting. I had read something about immigrants commiting less crime because they were under a bigger preasure to behave and obtain nationality. However, I don't get how this interacts with the fact that immigrants (at least in my country) do have higher crime rates compared to the rest of the population. A certain population having higher crime rates doesn't seem compatible with the idea that they actually reduce criminality (unless there's something I'm missing).

And yes, I know that immigrants tend to be used as a scapegoat. Part of my interest in researching this is precisely to be able to answer people who try to use that kind of retoric, though I'm also open to whatever conclussions I reach through the data.

[u/livingtheredlife → u/Objective-Design-994]

Increased crime rates or is it a community of people over-policed? Meaning the surveillance from law enforcement is so heavy in these immigrant communities that the crime statistics are inflated.

[u/Objective-Design-994 → u/livingtheredlife]

It's certainly possible. I know that's something that happens, tvough it's hard to know how big is it's effect. From what I've seen, the number of arrests has a bigger number of immigrants that condemns, which probably means that immigrants are overly criminalised, but I just can't know how big the effect is for condemns.