Abstract
Many countries have reduced refugee admissions in recent years, in part due to fears that refugees and asylum seekers increase crime rates and pose a national security risk. Existing research presents ambiguous expectations about the consequences of refugee resettlement on crime. We leverage a natural experiment in the United States, where an Executive Order by the president in January 2017 halted refugee resettlement. This policy change was sudden and significant—it resulted in the lowest number of refugees resettled on US soil since 1977 and a 66% drop in resettlement from 2016 to 2017. In this article, we find that there is no discernible effect on county-level property or violent crime rates.
Highlights
The number of refugees globally has reached new highs in the last decade and political conflict over the issue has followed
If we find that high-receiving areas have lower crime rates, this might just reflect the fact that resettlement agencies are reluctant to send refugees to areas with high crime rates
It plots the relationship between 2015/16–2017/18 changes in refugee arrivals and contemporaneous changes in crime rates along with the local nonparametric regression (LOESS) fit in blue
Summary
The number of refugees globally has reached new highs in the last decade and political conflict over the issue has followed. In the United States and across Europe, refugees and resettlement have become key campaign issues and common targets of resurgent right-wing parties (Dinas et al 2019; Dustmann et al 2019). In the US, domestic resettlement agencies administer the placement of refugees, and due to the nonrandom allocation process we cannot infer the effect of refugees on crime by comparing areas that receive many refugees to those that receive few. If we find that high-receiving areas have lower crime rates, this might just reflect the fact that resettlement agencies are reluctant to send refugees to areas with high crime rates. To alleviate selection bias and isolate the causal effect, we require changes in refugee resettlement that are exogenous with respect to local crime trends
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
