Trump regularly invokes anecdotes about immigration and crime. But despite some high-profile individual cases, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Michael Light says research shows increased immigration is not tied to higher crime rates.
“Criminologists have been studying the issue of immigration and crime for over a century and, generally speaking, what we find is that immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than native-born U.S. citizens,” he said. “It’s a fairly consistent finding.”