Legal is Better. How to Lower Immigrants Crime Rate
Policy makers are usually challenged when assessing the implications of migration barriers on crime. On the one hand, loose policies, such as easing the access to legal status for immigrants, might increase crime by precluding deportation of potential foreign criminals. On the other, such policies improve the opportunities faced by immigrants, dampening their incentive to engage in criminal activity. Therefore, determining the causal effect of legal status on crime is ultimately an empirical task which is undertaken by Paolo Pinotti (Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management) and Giovanni Mastrobuoni (Collegio Carlo Alberto) in Migration Restrictions and Criminal Behavior: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (forthcoming in Journal of the European Economic Association).
Pinotti, with Milo Bianchi, Université Paris Dauphine, and Paolo Buonanno, Università di Bergamo, had already highlighted that immigration affects only the incidence of robberies and isn't significantly different from zero in Do Immigrants Cause Crime? (Journal of the European Economic Association, Volume 10, Issue 6, pages 1318-1347, December 2012, doi: 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2012.01085.x).
Pinotti and Mastrobuoni propose to ground their empirical strategy on a search-theoretic model of crime that is consistent with the described trade-off. They establish the main threat of identification as being the endogenous selection of immigrants into legal status. In order to eliminate this selection bias, the authors make use of a natural experiment, namely the last round of the EU enlargement. In fact, they exploit individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy five months before the EU enlargement. The asymmetric effect of this enlargement across nationalities allows them to estimate the causal effect of legal status on crime behavior as measured by the post-release criminal record of pardoned foreign individuals. More precisely, the authors focus on difference-in-differences in the probability of re-incarceration between pardoned inmates from new EU member countries and a control group of inmates from candidate member countries, before and after the EU enlargement.
The results suggest that obtaining legal status lowers recidivism. Indeed, the probability of re-incarceration declines from 5.8% to 2.3% for Romanians and Bulgarians after they obtain legal status as a consequence of the EU enlargement, relative to no change for inmates from candidate member countries. This result is specific to offenders who were previously incarcerated for economically-motivated crimes. Also, the authors test the hypothesis that access to legitimate income opportunities raises the opportunity cost of crime. The empirical analysis confirms this conjecture as it shows that the difference in the probability of incarceration between inmates from new EU member countries and inmates from candidate member countries is stronger in geographical areas characterized by better income opportunities for legal immigrants.