Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010–2018: Demographics and Policy Implications

President Trump has prioritized the arrest and deportation of illegal immigrants based largely on his argument that they are a significant and disproportionate source of crime in the United States. But is his argument supported by the facts? Illegal immigration and the crimes illegal immigrants commit are notoriously difficult to measure. This policy analysis is the latest paper in a series that attempts to answer that question by estimating illegal immigrant incarceration rates in the United States by using the American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample from the U.S. Census. This analysis goes beyond previous studies in the series as it updates our residual estimation method based on new research authored by University of California, Riverside, doctoral candidate Christian Gunadi and published in Oxford Economic Papers. Furthermore, we apply the updated methods to estimate the illegal immigrant incarceration rates in earlier years. Gunadi’s new methods slightly increased the illegal immigrant crime rate relative to that of native‐​born Americans, but the illegal immigrant crime rate is still much lower than for that of native‐​born Americans. The states and federal government should collect better incarceration, conviction, and arrest data by immigration status so that we can more accurately understand how immigrants affect crime in the United States. Our estimates show that immi­grants are less likely to be incarcerated than native‐​born Americans relative to their share of the population. Separately, legal immigrants and illegal immigrants each are less likely to be incarcerated than native‐​born Americans.

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