A new Cato briefing paper published today challenges one of the most pervasive assumptions in American immigration debates: that illegal immigrants are more crime-prone than native-born Americans.

The data say otherwise.

Cato scholars Alex Nowrasteh and Michelangelo Landgrave analyzed 2024 Census data and found that illegal immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 — well below the native-born American rate of 1,195. Legal immigrants had the lowest rate of all, at just 303 per 100,000.

The paper, which extends a research series dating to 2017, also finds that mass deportation and aggressive enforcement of the broader illegal immigrant population would do little to reduce crime while diverting scarce law enforcement resources from higher-priority threats.

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