Immigrants Have a Lower Incarceration Rate than Native-Born Americans

Even When Excluding Black Americans

Cato recently published my newest policy analysis, “Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010–2023," co-authored with Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder Michelangelo Landgrave, who was also my former intern. This policy analysis is an updated version of earlier papers with newer data. Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated.

A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have such a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results but merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates.

Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000 but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.

It's worth pointing out that legal and illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates than their ethnic and racial counterparts in the native-born population in every case. Furthermore, black legal or illegal immigrants do not have the highest incarceration rates. Immigrants don’t just have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans because black Americans have such a high rate, but because immigrants of every racial and ethnic group have lower incarceration rates than their native-born ethnic and racial counterparts.