The Long Run Effect of Mexican Immigration on Crime in U.S. Cities: Evidence from Variation in Mexican Fertility Rates

Over the past thirty years, crime rates in cities across the United States initially increased and then declined precipitously, in many cases, reaching historic lows. At the same time, the share of the foreign born among the U.S. population has increased rapidly, with the foreign-born Mexican share of the population quadrupling since 1980. The majority of the increase in immigration has taken place since 1990 and coincides with the largest decline in U.S. crime rates since crime has been reliably measured. Research suggests that immigration has either played no role in this historic decline in crime (Butcher and Piehl 1998; MacDonald, Hipp and Gill 2012; Chalfin 2013) or has possibly contributed importantly to the decline (Ousey and Kubrin 2009; MacDonald and Saunders 2012). In particular, researchers have pointed to weak crosssectional relationships between immigrant concentrations and crime at the neighborhood level and small and often even negative correlations between changes in a city’s immigrant share and changes in a city’s crime rate over time. A recent exception to the entirety of the extant literature is that of Spenkuch (2013) who, in a careful analysis, studies the relationship between immigration and crime at the county level and concludes that there is a positive relationship between immigration, particularly Hispanic immigration, and instrumental crimes such as robbery and burglary. Despite the recent surge in academic interest this topic, the literature remains unsatisfying in several ways. First, the available literature rarely disaggregates the effects of immigration on crime by nationality. As Mexican immigrants comprise over one third of all immigrants to the United