Recent political instability in the Middle East has triggered one of the largest influxes of refugees into Europe. The different departure points along the Turkish coast generate exogenous variation in refugee arrivals across Greek islands. We construct a new dataset on the number and nature of crime incidents and arrested offenders at island level using official police records and newspaper reports. Instrumental variables and difference-in-differences are employed to study the causal relationship between immigration and crime.
We find that a 1-percentage-point increase in the share of refugees on destination islands increases crime incidents by 1.7-2.5 percentage points compared with neighboring unexposed islands. This is driven by crime incidents committed by refugees; there is no change in crimes committed by natives on those islands. We find a significant rise in property crime, knife attacks, and rape, but no increase in drug crimes. Results based on reported crimes exhibit a similar pattern. Our findings highlight the need for government provision in terms of infrastructure, social benefits, quicker evaluation for asylum, and social security.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.