Silence of the Innocants: Undocumented Immigrants' Underreporting of Crime and their Victimization

Stefano Comino (), Giovanni Mastrobuoni () and Antonio Nicolo'

No 564, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: Do undocumented migrants underreport crimes to the police in order to avoid deportations? And do criminals exploit such vulnerability? We use victimization surveys around the 1986 immigration amnesty to address two major identification issues: migrants' legal status is endogenous and unobserved. Right after the amnesty, which according to administrative records disproportionately legalized individuals of Hispanic origin, crime victims of Hispanic origin in cities with a large proportion of Hispanic applicants show enormous improvements in reporting behavior. There is some evidence of a reduced victimization following the amnesty, which is coherent with a behavioral crime model that guides our empirical strategies.

Keywords: immigration; amnesty; crime reporting; victimization survey. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 K37 K42 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages 52
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/no.564.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Silence of the Innocents: Undocumented Immigrants’ Underreporting of Crime and their Victimization (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wpaper:564

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().