How and Why Does Immigration Affect Crime? Evidence from Malaysia Caglar Ozden, Mauro Testaverde, and Mathis Wagner Abstract The perception that immigration fuels crime is an important source of anti-immigrant sentiment. Using Malaysian data for 2003-10, this paper provides estimates of the overall impact of economic immigration on crime, and evidence on different socio-economic mechanisms underpinning this relationship. The IV estimates suggest that immigration decreases crime rates, with an elasticity of around 0.97 for property and -1.8 vio- lent crimes. Three-quarters of the negative causal relationship between immigration and property crime rates can be explained by the impact of immigration on the underlying economic environment faced by natives. The reduction in violent crime rates is less readily explained by these factors. JEL classification: F22, K42 Key words: crime, immigration, labor markets Increased crime is among the main fears voiced in public opinion surveys on immigration. 1 Crime even surpasses economic concerns such as ”immigrants take jobs away from natives” as the main reason for public demands for more restrictive immigration policies in many destination countries (Mayda 2006; Bianchi, Pinotti, and Buonanno 2012). Despite its prominence in the public narrative, the academic liter- ature on the linkages between immigration and crime is still sparse and often inconclusive (see Bell and Machin 2013 for a survey of the literature). This paper makes three main contributions to this literature. First, it provides causal estimates of the overall impact of immigration on different types of crime. Second, the paper presents evidence on the mechanisms that underlie this impact. Third, while previous work has focused almost entirely on high-income OECD destination countries, the paper provides analy- sis for Malaysia, a major middle-income destination where there is considerable public concern about the impact of immigration on crime. Caglar Ozden is Lead Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank; his email is cozden@worldban- k.org. Mauro Testaverde is Economist in the Social Protection and Labor Practice at the World Bank; his email address is [email protected]. Mathis Wagner (corresponding author) is a professor at Boston College, Boston, MA, USA; his email address is [email protected]. The authors thank Michel Beine, David McKenzie, Chris Parsons, Giovanni Peri, and participants at the Migration and Development Conference for comments and discussion. They are grateful to Ximena Del Carpio who led the technical advisory project that forms the basis for this paper and provided invaluable guid- ance. The findings, conclusions, and views expressed are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed to the World Bank, its executive directors, and the countries they represent. A supplemental appendix to this article is available at https://academic.oup.com/wber. 1 See, for example, Duffy and Frere-Smith (2013). V C The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] doi: 10.1093/wber/lhx010 Article The World Bank Economic Review, 32(1), 2018, 183–202 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/wber/article-abstract/32/1/183/3866886 by World Bank Publications user on 08 August 2019 Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized
How and Why Does Immigration Affect Crime? Evidence from Malaysia
Aug 04, 2023
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