Legal Status and the Criminal Activity of Immigrants

Abstract

We exploit exogenous variation in legal status following the January 2007 European Union enlargement to estimate its effect on immigrant crime. We difference out unobserved time-varying factors by i) comparing recidivism rates of immigrants from the "new" and "candidate" member countries; and ii) using arrest data on foreign detainees released upon a mass clemency that occurred in Italy in August 2006. The timing of the two events allows us to setup a difference-in-differences strategy. Legal status leads to a 50 percent reduction in recidivism, and explains one-half to two-thirds of the observed differences in crime rates between legal and illegal immigrants. JEL: F22, K42, C41

Clicking on Heaven’s Door: The Effect of Immigrant Legalization on Crime

“…Distinguishing between economically motivated crimes (thefts, robberies, drug-trafficking, extortion, and smuggling) and purely violent crimes (murders and sex offenses), legal status only affects the former type of offenses. 36 This last result is consistent with previous evidence in Baker (2015) ;Freedman, Owens, and Bohn (2013);and Mastrobuoni and Pinotti (2015).…”

“…However, these figures may reflect the different composition of the two groups, as opposed to the (causal) effect of legal status. In particular, the undocumented are typically young, single males, and are less educated than legal immigrants (Cohn and Passel 2009;Caponi and Plesca 2014;and Mastrobuoni and Pinotti 2015). More generally, the two groups could differ along other (possibly unobserved) dimensions that are relevant to criminal behavior.…”

“…With regard to other countries, in a previous paper with Giovanni Mastrobuoni (Mastrobuoni and Pinotti 2015), we exploit variation in legal status across pardoned prison inmates in Italy after the EU expansion of January 2007. We find that after the EU accession, recidivism declined markedly-from 5.8 percent to 2.3 percent over a six-month period -among inmates from the new EU member countries, whereas no change occurred in a control group of inmates from EU-candidate member countries.…”

Immigration, Employment Opportunities, and Criminal Behavior

“…Income-generating offenses include robbery, burglary, car theft, larceny, fraud, forgery, gambling, prostitution, and any felony drug charge. 12 Crimes that we classified as non-income generating are murder, manslaughter, assault, arson, offenses against children, kidnapping, destruction of property, sexual assault, weapons violations, trespassing, evasion of arrest, corruption, conspiracy, and public order offenses. 13 We excluded all DUI charges (765 cases), as repeat DUIs were officially classified as felonies for the first time in the late 1980s.…”

Illegal Migration and Consumption Behavior of Immigrant Households

“…It granted amnesty to illegal immigrants who entered the United States before January 1, 1982, and had lived in the U.S. continuously since that time. To the best of our knowledge, only few other papers (Kaushal 2006;Devillanova et al 2014;Mastrobuoni and Pinotti 2015;Pinotti 2015) study the relation between legal status and behavior based on designs other than the IRCA reform.…”