The Myth of Immigrant Violence

There are two problems with President Donald Trump’s claim that we are currently seeing a spike in violent crime and that immigrants, legal and undocumented, are responsible. As a previous Data Wonk column pointed out, there hasn’t been a spike in violent crime.

The column used data from the Milwaukee Police Department’s Dashboard for Milwaukee major crime data. In 2019 Milwaukee homicides bottomed out at 80 only to double to 167 in 2020, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. They peaked at 203 in 2022. Since then, homicides have declined to 116 in 2024. Non-fatal shootings have followed a similar pattern, hitting 442 in 2019, peaking at 876 in 2022, and then declining to 639 in the year just concluded.

At the time, a second dashboard, sponsored by MPD and the Medical College of Wisconsin, had not been updated to report the full year of 2024. This dashboard adds to information on homicides and non-fatal shootings. Among other things this dashboard includes information on the location of the shootings and on victims and suspects, which helps provide information on who is committing the crimes.

The graph below looks at the relationship between the number of homicides and non-fatal shootings in each of Milwaukee’s 15 Common Council districts. Two districts are predominantly Hispanic, districts 8 and 12. In each about 70% of the residents are Hispanic according to numbers from the US Census Bureau.

If Trump were correct that immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants bring crime, one would expect these districts to experience particularly high rates of homicides and non-fatal shootings. As the next graph shows that is not the case. The two predominantly Hispanic districts have lower levels of shooting than eight of the 15 districts and far below five of them.

Instead, the Common Council districts with the highest homicide and non-fatal shooting rates are the five districts with the highest concentration of Black residents, as shown in the graph below.

As the next graph shows, to describe the victims of gun violence is to describe the suspect. In either case the person most at risk is a Black male in his late teens and early twenties and living in one of Milwaukee’s predominantly Black neighborhoods.

Since 2022, there has been a definite decline in Milwaukee gun violence. As the next graph suggests, the benefit of this decline has been widely shared across the city, although we still have a long way to go.

Although the causes of gun violence are often complex, two contributors are poverty and drug dealing. I would also suggest that the violence may feed on itself. Residents of these high violence neighborhoods, recognizing that they live in a dangerous place, are more likely to carry a gun for protection. Also teachers and principals report the impact of gun violence on young children.

But the idea that immigrants are causing higher crime in cities like Milwaukee is simply not proven by the data.