CATO study on incarceration rates

I recently stumbled upon this March 2026 study from the Libertarian/Conservative think tank, the CATO Institute: Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010–2024: The Demographics of American Imprisonment. The report starts by noting that "available evidence shows that [undocumented noncitizens] are less crime-prone than native-born Americans." Moreover, "All immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans."

This isn't surprising give the 2023 study by Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky, and his many co-authors, looking at incarceration data from 1870 to 2020 and finding that “immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years.”

Back to the CATO report. It notes the wide gap between the perception and reality of immigrant criminality–something its authors, Alex Nowrasteh and Michelangelo Landgrave, have been writing on for a while.

The CATO report makes this interesting finding as well:

llegal and legal immigrants who immigrate at a younger age are more likely to be incarcerated, which is related to the amount of time those immigrants have spent in the United States—but it is still distinct (Table 8). Illegal immigrants who arrive between ages 0 and 17 are almost 180 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those who arrive between 18 and 24, suggesting that illegal immigrants who were old enough to choose to come here illegally are more law-abiding than those who were brought here as minors. The pattern is less pronounced, albeit still notable, for legal immigrants. Those who immigrated between the ages of 0 and 17 were 150 percent more likely to be incarcerated than legal immigrants who came at older ages. This again suggests that those who were old enough to choose to come to the United States legally are more law-abiding regardless of their legal status.

So, what do the authors see as policy implications?

• "federal officials should stop their efforts to convince so-called sanctuary cities to fully abandon those policies because such cooperation will likely have no effect on violent and property crime rates nationwide."
• "the federal government should convince sanctuary jurisdictions and others to turn over any noncitizen guilty of committing a violent or property-related offense for removal from the United States"
• "The federal government should ... make the removal of illegal immigrant criminals a priority, but it should not widen its reach to include illegal immigrants who have not committed criminal offenses or have not otherwise put Americans at risk"