Immigration and crimes against natives: the 2015 refugee crisis in Germany
During the 2015 refugee crisis, nearly one million refugees arrived in Germany, raising widespread concern that crimes against natives would rise. Using novel country-level data, we study this question empirically in first-difference and two-stage least squares (2SLS) regressions. Our results do not support the view that Germans were victimized in great numbers by refugees, as measured by their rate of victimization in crimes with refugee suspects. Our findings are of great policy and public interest, and also of material relevance for the broader literature on immigration and crime, which mostly considers crimes per capita or variants thereof. We show that such aggregate measures may be insufficiently informative about the actual civtimization patterns of specific groups.
Kvasnicka, M. and Y. Huang (2026), Immigration and crimes against natives: the 2015 refugee crisis in Germany. Journal of Population Economics, 39, 3, 54