Alex Nowrasteh
High-profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants dominate the headlines, but the available evidence shows that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. The federal government rightly seeks to exclude criminal illegal immigrants from the United States and remove those who commit crimes here. However, the good news is that illegal immigrants have a significantly lower crime rate than native-born Americans, whether you measure by estimates of nationwide incarceration rates, arrest rates, or criminal conviction rates.
The best research on illegal immigrant criminality uses data from Texas, which uniquely records arrest and conviction data for illegal and legal immigrants by crime. Of all the crimes recorded, homicide is most useful for comparing the relative crime rates of illegal immigrants with other subpopulations. People tend to report homicides, so the total number of homicides committed is closest to being known even if a substantial fraction are unsolved, which isn’t true for most other violent or property crimes.
Relatedly, homicide is a serious crime that most worries the public. Specifically in Texas, but likely in other states as well, state authorities thoroughly investigate the immigration statuses of people convicted of the most serious crimes like homicide, so there is a more accurate count of convicted and incarcerated illegal immigrant murders than illegal immigrant criminals convicted of other offenses.
In Texas, the homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants was 3.1 per 100,000 compared to 4.9 for native-born Americans in 2022. Illegal immigrants had a homicide conviction rate 35.6 percent below that of native-born Americans in 2022. Another way of describing the data is that illegal immigrants were 7.1 percent of Texas’ population in that year and were convicted of only 5 percent of all homicides. Native-born Americans made up 82.5 percent of Texas’ population but accounted for 90.5 percent of all people convicted of homicide
For over a decade, Texas was the only state that reported detailed data on illegal immigrants arrested and convicted of crimes. That changed beginning on May 1, 2024, when Georgia Governor David Kemp (R) signed the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act of 2024 (HB 1105) into law. Among other things, HB 1105 required state officials to publish quarterly data on the number of illegal immigrant inmates who have an immigration detainer by crime. The Georgia data are different from the Texas data. The Georgia data measure inmates incarcerated in Georgia, the Texas data record criminal convictions and arrests.
Another note is that the Georgia data are based on immigration detainers, which are holds placed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that request inmates be turned over to ICE for removal upon release from prison. There was a dispute over whether Georgia had sanctuary jurisdictions before HB 1105 even though the state legislature banned them, but there have been no sanctuary jurisdictions in Georgia since May 1, 2024.
As of the 4th quarter of 2024, there were 1,717 illegal immigrants incarcerated in Georgia out of an inmate population of 51,796. Illegal immigrants are 3.3 percent of the state’s incarcerated population but 3.9 percent of the state-wide population. The state-wide population data are two years old (from the 2022 American Community Survey) and estimated using my modified Gunadi residual method. That translates to an illegal immigrant incarceration rate of 399 per 100,000 illegal immigrants (Figure 1). The incarceration rate for the rest of the population, which includes native-born Americans and legal immigrants, is 478 per 100,000.
The illegal immigrant incarceration rate for homicide in Georgia was 61 per 100,000 illegal immigrants. For the rest of the population, which includes legal immigrants and native-born Americans, the incarceration rate was 90 per 100,000. The illegal immigrant incarceration rate for homicide in Georgia is 32 percent below that of the non-illegal immigrant population in 2024, very similar to the lower illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate for homicide in Texas relative to native-born Americans.
The homicide incarceration rates reported in Figure 1 include those inmates convicted of murder, murder in the second degree, homicide by vessel, involuntary manslaughter, vehicular homicide, and voluntary manslaughter. Table 1 breaks down the incarceration rates for each specific homicide offense. Illegal immigrants have a lower incarceration rate for murder, involuntary manslaughter, vehicular homicide, and voluntary manslaughter. They have a higher incarceration rate for murder in the second degree and homicide by vessel. There were only five illegal immigrants incarcerated in Georgia for murder in the second degree and homicide by vessel.
Figure 1 and Table 1 do not include controls for race, ethnicity, age, sex, or any other common variables used to analyze and compare crime data. With any combination of those controls, the relative illegal immigrant incarceration would be even lower. There are at least two other reasons why the above data likely overstate the relative illegal immigrant incarceration rate. First, the rest of the population includes legal immigrants who have a lower incarceration rate than native-born Americans and illegal immigrants in other studies of immigrant criminality. Lumping the lower crime legal immigrant population in with native-born Americans lowers the incarceration rate for that population by a likely significant amount since legal immigrants are almost 7 percent of Georgia’s population. Second, the population data are from 2022, not 2024 (the year of the inmate data). The illegal immigrant population in Georgia is higher in 2024 than in 2022, which means the incarceration rates are likely lower for illegal immigrants than reported above.
However, there is at least one reason why the illegal immigrant incarceration data could be understated. First, there are 804 people incarcerated in Georgia whose immigration statuses are not determined, and some of them will turn out to be illegal immigrants. There are 91 people with ICE detainers whose birthplaces are recorded as “United States,” some of whom may turn out to be US citizens, while many are probably not accurately reporting their places of birth. Regardless of the ultimate immigration statuses of those undetermined inmates, the finding of an additional incarcerated illegal immigrant would increase their incarceration rates reported above, but the extent of that increase is unknown.
There is also an important ambiguity that could increase or decrease the relative illegal immigrant incarceration rates in Georgia. Some of the inmates currently identified as illegal immigrants will likely turn out to have been misidentified and are actually legal immigrants or native-born Americans. This has happened before, and citizens have even been accidentally removed from the United States. However, some inmates who do not have detainers could also be illegal immigrants and their statuses will be discovered upon further investigation by state and federal officers. The net effect is unknown and could affect the incarceration rates in either direction.
Another potential wrinkle is the data are for “Active Offenders,” which includes those classified as inmates at the Georgia Department of Corrections. For the purposes of this post, I assume that means the incarcerated population, although it also includes those out to court, on reprieves, conditional transfers, or who have escaped. That classification shouldn’t affect the results but it is worth noting.
It’s important that we now have publicly available data about illegal immigrant incarcerations from Georgia. HB 1105 was passed after University of Georgia student Laken Riley was murdered in February 2024 by Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Ibarra was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. None of the above data lessen the tragedy of Riley’s murder, nor are the relative crime rates an argument for leniency— criminals should be punished for their crimes regardless of where they are from.
However, the above numbers do indicate that illegal immigrants are not a disproportionate criminal threat, they do not increase crime rates overall, and extra enforcement of normal immigration laws will not lower crime rates. Ibarra and other illegal immigrant criminals should be punished, but their crimes are not good reasons to punish others with the same immigration status who did not commit crimes and who are part of a subpopulation that is less crime-prone than other subpopulations and all residents of Georgia.
Georgia should start reporting criminal convictions and arrests in their state by crime with more detailed data that separate legal and illegal immigrants as Texas does, just as I recommend here, and Texas should start publicly reporting their incarceration data for illegal and legal immigrant inmates. Regardless, every state should report both sets of data.
This isn’t the final word on the relative scale of illegal immigrant criminality in the United States or even in the state of Georgia. But it’s more evidence consistent with other findings that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans or, in this case, the rest of the population.