Immigration and Crimes against Natives: The 2015 Refugee Crisis in Germany

Yue Huang () and Michael Kvasnicka ()
Additional contact information
Yue Huang: Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University
Michael Kvasnicka: Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, RWI, IZA@LISER

No 202603, IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU)

Abstract: During the 2015 refugee crisis, nearly one million refugees arrived in Germany, raising widespread concern that crimes against natives would rise. Using novel county-level data, we study this question empirically in first-difference and 2SLS regressions. Our results do not support the view that Germans were victimized in greater 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 victimization patterns of specific groups.

Keywords: Immigration; Refugees; Crimes; Crimes Against Natives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J15 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75 pages
Date: 2026-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iaaeu.de/images/DiscussionPaper/2026_03.pdf First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iaa:dpaper:202603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrian Chadi ().