Are immigrants more likely to commit crimes? Evidence from France

Abstract

Using French data, we find that the share of immigrants in the population has no significant impact on crime rates once immigrants' economic circumstances are controlled for, while finding that unemployed immigrants tend to commit more crimes than unemployed nonimmigrants.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Manabu Asai, Takayuki Watanabe and Ralph Paprzycki for helpful comments and to Gui Sisi for her help in collecting data.

Notes

¹ By ‘immigrants’ we mean those who were born outside of France and subsequently acquired French nationality.

² France is divided into 96 departments. (This number excludes the four overseas departments or territories).

³ In their study on crime and economic inequality in the United States, Harer and Steffensmeier (1992) use the difference between the log value of the mean income of white and black families. However, information on immigrants' average income is unfortunately not available in our dataset.

⁴ We assume that all workers in each category are paid the average wage of the category. Due to data limitations, we do not use the income of the self-employed in constructing the Gini coefficient.

⁵ The Hansen J-statistics presented in the bottom row suggest that the instruments used in the GMM estimation are valid in all specifications.