Do Refugees Cause Crime?

The impact of immigration on crime continues to stir heated debates in public policy circles around the world whilst surveys indicate that host societies favor mitigating measures because they are concerned of what they perceive as an impingement on their security with each new wave of migration inflow. Whether there is any truth to such perceptions, however, remains a mystery for the case of developing countries since causal evidence is extremely limited. That those countries host the overwhelming majority of the global refugee population makes it paramount for researchers to supply the missing scientific link. Propelled by the magnitude of this need, this paper analyzes the impact of refugees on crime rates using the case of Turkey that hosts the world’s largest refugee population within any national borders. In doing so, it uses instrumental variables, Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Staggered DiD methods to explain if the war-fleeing Syrian refugees pushed Turkey’s crime rates higher both in the short and the long-run. Controlling for various time-varying characteristics of provinces and presenting a battery of robustness checks against various identification threats, its findings show either null or negative effects of refugees on the incidence of criminal activity in the country.