Does refugee inflow affect urban crime? Evidence from the U.S. 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.