Two Sundays ago, two shootings, apparently related, claimed the lives of two men; a third is fighting for his life. The shootings took place just outside a migrant shelter for nearly 800 single adults that has been operating since April, and the three victims are migrants, sources told the New York Post. This double murder, possibly committed by migrant gang members, is just the latest in a series of high-profile violent migrant crimes in the city. But what’s the actual migrant crime rate—both for perpetrators and for victims? We don’t know, and New York City mayor Eric Adams, despite his tough rhetoric on migrants committing crimes, hasn’t moved to direct the NYPD to collect and disseminate such data.
This recent double homicide isn’t the first such killing. In May, one migrant fatally stabbed another outside a Harlem migrant shelter. In January, a similar dispute between migrant men, this one at the Randall’s Island mass shelter, resulted in one man killed. In June, a migrant fatally shot two residents of a Bronx building after they objected to his illegally squatting there. Non-fatal crimes are too numerous to mention, among them, also all just from this year, the June forcible rape of a girl in Queens, the June nonfatal shooting of two police officers (also in Queens), the February shooting of a tourist during a shoplifting attempt in Times Square, multiple violent robberies, and shoplifting (without shootings) that commonly goes unreported to police.
Do these anecdotes add up to a higher or lower rate of migrant crime, violent and otherwise, compared with the local average? There is no way to know because these stories represent only partial data. The NYPD doesn’t report crime by immigration status, doing its part to keep New York a “sanctuary city.”
Any concern that migrants are pushing up crime is met with bromides. Historically, immigrant crime rates are lower than the national average, the experts tell us. New York absorbed some half a million unauthorized immigrants between the early 1980s and 2019, and yet for three of those nearly four decades, city crime rates and visible disorder fell. Finally, New York City felony crime is more or less flat since 2022, when the current wave of migrants began arriving.
None of these arguments is comforting. Biden-era migration is not like the previous immigration wave to New York City. There are the numbers: the city estimates that 200,000 people have arrived in little more than two years, with 65,000 of them currently in city shelters. We’ve thus crammed well more than a decade’s worth of recent historical migration into two years. Then there is the economic environment: neither New York’s economy nor its non-migrant population is growing quickly, as it did between the 1980s and 2019, and so migrants are largely competing with each other and driving down wages in the city’s underground economy for restaurant work, construction work, domestic labor, and peddling.