Does refugee inflow affect urban crime? Evidence from the US Indochinese refugee resettlement

We study the city-level crime effects of immigration using a large migratory episode in U.S. cities: the resettlement of postwar Indochinese refugees in the 1970s-1980s. We examine the impact of these migratory inflows, where the destination of refugees was largely exogeneously determined, on the incidence of various types of crime by aggregating county-level crime data. Results from a difference-in-differences analysis imply that the cities receiving the heaviest inflows of refugees did not experience differential trends in property crime or violent crime rates following this period; while there is an upward impact on murder rates, pre-trends do not match for this variable, and further analysis via the synthetic control method show that any upward impact is driven primarily by a temporary (5 years at most) surge in three metropolitan statistical areas. Our results suggest that consistent with prior literature, even a large refugee inflow may not by itself generate persistent crime increases.