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.
Then, there’s the environment of disorder that absorbs new migrants. A young male migrant who arrived in, say, 2010 might observe: police and prosecutors more or less enforce the law. Therefore, it’s not wise to smoke pot in public, engage in small-scale thievery, or ride a bike (never mind a motorized bike) the wrong way down the sidewalk. Today, it doesn’t take more than a few days in New York City to observe that anything goes; young migrant men can blast their music outside the Row Hotel in Times Square at all hours of the night or hire a trafficked prostitute on Queens’s Roosevelt Avenue without having to worry much about repercussions.
This environment of lawlessness is particularly attractive to one subset of today’s migrants: gang members from Venezuela. The NYPD suspects that the alleged perpetrators of several recent high-profile crimes, including the Queens cop shooting, were members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, which is engaged in people smuggling, human-labor trafficking, drug trafficking, and fencing stolen goods. As the Financial Times reported last month regarding Chile, a generally safe country, Venezuelan migrants “have fundamentally changed the nature of crime” there, turning “fashionable” downtown properties into sex-trafficking brothels, among other organized illegal endeavors, and enforcing their territories with violence.
Finally, the city’s flat-ish crime numbers aren’t much reassurance, either. Yes, in 2024 (through mid-July), felony crime is 2.1 percent below last year’s levels, and petit larceny is down 2.2 percent. But crime, violent and otherwise, remains significantly above 2019 levels. Felony crime is 35 percent above levels of five years ago (historical petit-larceny data are temporarily unavailable). Covid-era dislocations no longer work as an excuse, as they could between 2020 and 2022; New York’s jobs total has recovered back to 2019 levels (if anemically), kids are back in school, and mental-health care has resumed. A disorganized New York City government trying to enforce laws in an environment of greater leniency dictated by state-level reforms is partly to blame, but only an ideologue would discount any potential migrant role.
We wouldn’t have to speculate if the Adams administration would give us some data. And no, the mayor isn’t entirely hamstrung by the city council’s sanctuary city policies, which prohibit most cooperation between local government and federal immigration officials. Police officers can ask a suspect’s immigration status when investigating a crime beyond being illegally in the country. They can inquire whether a suspect lives, or has recently lived, in a migrant shelter, a good indication of whether someone is a migrant. The city can also investigate whether a crime suspect had any ties to New York that pre-date 2022. For now, the NYPD could periodically report such data in the aggregate, so as not to run afoul of city council edicts governing the confidentiality of such data (though it is not absolute).
Migrant crime may be higher than the local average—or it might be lower. How could anyone object simply to trying to find out? Good policy is based on data and facts, not suppositions and headlines.
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