Crime Perception and Victimization in Europe: Does Immigration Matter?

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the effect of changes in immigration in region of residence on the likelihood of being a crime victim and on the subjective representation of criminality in local area of residence. To this purpose, the analysis exploits the recent immigration waves that took place in western European regions in the 2000s, using European Social Survey data matched with data from Labour Force Survey and other sources. Three alternative research strategies are proposed and discussed to account for possible endogeneity and measurement error of migration penetration: fixed effects by regions and country specific years; IV by instrumenting migration penetration at regional level using a second measurement provided by an alternative data source and an IV specification in differences where changes in immigration are instrumented using exogenous supply-push changes by migration flow areas. All identification strategies suggest no effect of immigration on crime victimization and perception in western Europe. However, simple OLS estimates suggest otherwise, implying that regional unobserved characteristics are partly responsible for inducing the public to wrongly imply a causal relationship between immigration and crime, whereas only a small positive correlation exists. This latter finding helps explaining why crime perception is an important driver of the attitude of European citizens towards immigration.