The illegal immigrants who streamed into New York City over the past four years led to increases in crime near the hotels where they were housed, according to a new academic study that lends some credence to President Trump’s claims of a Biden migrant crime surge.
William LeRoy, an incoming professor at Charles University in Prague, crunched crime report data and found that arrests of Hispanics, the dominant demographic of the largely Venezuelan newcomers, rose in the immediate areas around the hotels.
The significant increase was in lower-level thefts.
“The baseline increase in Hispanic arrest rates is driven primarily by cash-generating offenses, such as petit and grand larceny, indicating that economic hardship is a leading factor behind criminal behavior,” Mr. LeRoy concluded.
He said the crime increases seemed to be tied to the lack of job prospects for the new arrivals.
Using Hispanics as proxies for illegal immigrants, Mr. LeRoy compared crime reports with ZIP codes where migrants showed up in city-funded housing. He found a 5.5% increase, relative to the average, in the percentage of Hispanic arrests starting with the arrival of the first bus of migrants sent in August 2022 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
The study lends credence to New Yorkers’ angst over the migrants flooding their city under President Biden. It also challenges the assurances of immigrant rights advocates who dismissed crime fears as unfounded.
Residents of Denver, Chicago and Boston complained of increased crime associated with illegal immigrants, but New York drew a lot of attention because of its prominent welcoming policies and the sheer number of migrants taking advantage of them.
The city said it received nearly 230,000 migrants from spring 2022 through the start of this year. About 45,000 were sent on buses by Mr. Abbott, who was looking to spread Texas’ border-state pain.
Residents were shocked by high-profile crimes, including the beating of two New York Police Department officers outside a migrant hotel and reports of migrants roaming the streets on mopeds and grabbing handbags and phones from pedestrians.
Mr. LeRoy said theft was far more common in his data. Two-thirds of the crime increase he identified was tied to misdemeanors, particularly cash crimes such as larceny.
He said the lack of job prospects seemed to explain the crimes.
As illegal immigrants, the newcomers were generally forbidden from holding jobs, but many tried to find work as day laborers. Mr. LeRoy said the crime increase disappeared in locations near Home Depot stores, frequent gathering spots for illegal immigrants trying to hire out for a day’s work.
Mr. LeRoy used Hispanics as a proxy for illegal immigrants because no citizenship data was associated with the crime reports. He said it was a safe assumption because of the demographics of the newcomers, who were heavily Hispanic and, in particular, largely Venezuelan.
Alex Nowrasteh, a Cato Institute scholar who has studied migrants and crime, expressed concern with that equation.
“The author acknowledges this, but this undermines the paper’s claims,” he said.
It’s not clear how much the findings affect the broader debate about illegal immigrants and crime.
Mr. LeRoy said the poor economic conditions might not apply to longer-term illegal immigrants who have either managed to secure work permits or have found jobs in the underground economy.
Still, he said, cities with influxes of illegal immigrants, particularly from busing, might have experienced similar increases in crime.
Mr. Nowrasteh said Mr. LeRoy looked at a particular population — migrants who were bused or made their way to New York and who ended up in government-provided housing — that it can’t be extrapolated to other illegal immigrants.
Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies and a regular debater with Mr. Nowrasteh on migrant crime, said Mr. LeRoy’s findings make sense.
“It is not surprising that the arrival of migrants, often men, in a place where they have few ties will be associated at least in the short term with an increase in crime,” Mr. Camarota said.
“This is one of those sorts of social disorder things that comes with high levels of immigration, and, of course, it might have continued but for the cutting-off of the flow,” he said.
