Do refugees cause crime?

The impact of immigration on crime continues to stir heated debates in public policy circles around the world. Surveys indicate that host societies favor controversial measures because they are concerned about what they perceive to be an impingement exacted on their security with each new wave of migration. Seeking whether there is any truth to such perceptions, this paper analyzes the refugees’ impact on crime rates, using the case of Turkey which has started to host the world's largest refugee population within any national borders due to the Syrian civil war. In doing so, the paper employs instrumental variables, difference-in-differences (DiD), and staggered DiD methods to explain if the conflict-fleeing Syrians have pushed Turkey's crime rates higher in the short and the long run. It also controls for a multitude of time-varying provincial characteristics and presents a battery of robustness checks against various identification threats. As a result, DiD estimates show that refugees do not have any causal effect on the crime rates in Turkey. More strikingly, its IV estimates provide evidence for a rather negative effect on the crime rates per capita whilst finding a null effect on the crime rates per native resident in particular.