Immigration has become one of America’s sharpest flashpoints, increasingly framed not only as a border issue but as a public safety threat. In recent weeks, that framing has turned into real-world confrontation.

In Minneapolis, federal immigration agents fatally shot U.S. citizen and Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti during an enforcement operation, just weeks after agents killed another U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, during a separate immigration action.

Chicago has also been a major stage for immigration enforcement. Federal officials have repeatedly cited the city in public statements and enforcement announcements arguing that immigration enforcement is necessary for public safety, including through high-profile operations such as Operation Midway Blitz, which was billed as targeting the “worst of the worst,” including alleged gang members.

At its core, this argument rests on a simple claim: Immigration is driving serious violence, and aggressive enforcement is therefore necessary for public safety.

That claim is testable.

In our new study, we examine fatal and nonfatal shootings across 77 Chicago neighborhoods from 2010 to 2021 and assess whether changes in immigration are followed by changes in serious violence. In our analysis, immigration is measured as the neighborhood share of residents who are foreign-born, a standard census-based measure used in research on immigration and crime. This measure does not identify legal status, but it captures neighborhood-level changes in immigrant presence that public debates often treat as drivers of violence.

We distinguish shootings recorded as gang-related in official law enforcement data on crime incidents from those not classified as gang-related. While any such classification is imperfect, Chicago is one of the few large U.S. cities that routinely records gang involvement in shooting incidents, and these measures are widely used in Chicago violence research.

The results are clear. We find no evidence that rising immigration increases gang shootings, fatal or nonfatal. At the same time, immigration is consistently associated with fewer shootings that are not gang-related. For fatal shootings overall, each 1-percentage-point increase in a neighborhood’s foreign-born population was associated with about a 3.9% decrease in fatal shootings.

Put simply, if a neighborhood’s immigrant share rose by just 5 percentage points, we would expect roughly a 20% reduction in fatal shootings. Similar patterns appear for nonfatal shootings, especially those unrelated to gangs, where higher immigrant presence is consistently linked to lower levels of violence.

Individual cases can dominate headlines. But across Chicago neighborhoods over time, immigrant growth was not followed by a rise in shootings. This pattern is consistent with a large body of prior research finding that immigration does not increase violent crime.

It’s important to be clear about what our study does and doesn’t claim. We analyze neighborhoods, not individuals. That means we are not claiming that individual immigrants never commit crime, and we are not labeling immigrants as “good” or “bad.” This is also not a randomized experiment, and neighborhood data cannot answer every individual-level question.

But it tests the core prediction behind the public debate: If immigration growth drives shootings, shootings should rise in the neighborhoods that see increases in the immigration population. In Chicago, they do not. And even if immigrant populations are imperfectly measured, this data offers no consistent reason to expect that immigration growth drives up gang shootings when the pattern is simply not there.

None of this is an argument against border policy. It is an argument for accuracy, precision and evidence-based public safety. When immigration is assumed to be a source of community violence, policy moves toward aggressive enforcement strategies rather than interventions that directly reduce shootings. And when gangs are invoked as proof of a generalized immigrant threat, it becomes harder to see what is really needed to prevent gang violence.

If policymakers want fewer people shot, they should focus on what actually predicts and prevents gun violence: interrupting cycles of retaliation before they escalate, supporting trusted community members who mediate conflict, concentrating resources on the small networks and places where violence is most likely to occur and reducing easy access to firearms.

Treating immigrants as a catchall explanation for violence may be politically convenient. It won’t make our cities safer.

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Calvin Proffit is a doctoral candidate, sociological criminologist John Leverso is an assistant professor and Ben Feldmeyer is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.

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