Study shows no increase in city crime after large groups of Indochinese refugees were settled in the US in the 1970s and 1980s

Authors Chung and Bae published the results of a unique look at the impact of an influx of immigrants on US city crime rates in their article, which appeared last month in the Southern Economic Journal. They wanted to examine the common assumption that immigration leads to increased crime. The post-Vietnam War waves of Indochinese refugee resettlement in the United States allowed the authors to leverage a natural experiment. Unlike those refugees, typically people can choose when and where they migrate, “which is likely correlated with unobservable characteristics that influence crime,” making it tough to show a causal relationship. But Chung and Bae were able to compare crime in cities where the Indochinese refugees were settled by the US government, and where they were not settled, over time. They used data collected by the United States Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to construct measures of refugee inflows at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level. And from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), Chung and Bae downloaded Uniform Crime Reporting Program data containing county-level counts of crime as reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBI, which Chung and Bae aggregated to the MSA level. With those data, Chung and Bae could examine the incidents of three broad categories of criminal offenses to serve as their primary measure of crime in cities where refugees were resettled and where they were not. Among their findings: “increased Indochinese refugee settlements in the 1970s and 1980s did not meaningfully affect property or violent crime rates, and did not have long-term effects on murder rates.”