MIPP researcher is awarded IDB fund on migration

The “Immigration and Crime” research proposal of Raimundo Undurraga, researcher with the MIPP Millennium Institute and academic at the Industrial Engineering department, University of Chile, was selected by the “Understanding the Impacts of Migration in Latin America and the Caribbean” contest of the Inter-American Development Bank.

The funds of the contest – awarded to six initiatives selected from more than 50 proposals – are directed at contributing towards a deeper understanding of the impacts of migration on Latin American countries.

In particular, the “Immigration and Crime” study aims at examining the relationship between immigration, crime and victimization (perception of crime), in the case of Chile.

“Immigrants tend to be a source of conflict for local populations. They are usually accused of being the cause of increases in unemployment and poverty rates, and they are often targets of discrimination. The greatest expression of the conflict would be an increase in crime and violence, especially in large cities. The question is whether there exists any empirical backing that validates this hypothesis,” explains Undurraga.

Undurraga, together with Nicolás Ajzenman (Sao Paulo School of Economics), collected data on immigration, unemployment, crime, and victimization at the individual and community levels in Chile, for a period covering the last decade.

«Analyzing the case of Chile is a paradigmatic exercise; it is one of the countries with the highest absolute increase in migrants in the region since 2010, especially from 2015 onwards. Our preliminary results indicate that the correlation between immigration and crime is quite weak. Basically, changes in crime rates do not seem to be affected by the changes in immigration levels that the country has experienced in the last decade. This is consistent with existing empirical evidence, which suggests that the relationship between immigration and crime is generally void.”

“The funds obtained from the IDB contest will allow us to acquire additional data in order to causally explore the mechanisms underlying these preliminary results,” concludes the academic.