Do immigrants cause crime?

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police administrative data, we first document that the size of immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of most types of crime, as well as with the overall number of criminal offenses. However, using changes of immigrant population in other European countries to identify exogenous shifts of immigrant population in Italy, the causal effect seems limited to some categories of crime: murders, robberies and, to a lesser extent, thefts.