Immigrants, Legal Status, and Illegal Trade

Area of Science:

• Criminology
• Economics
• Sociology

Background:

• Illicit global trade, valued at nearly $2 trillion annually, fuels violence and social costs.
• Traffickers often utilize co-ethnic networks due to the lack of legal contracts and difficulties in finding partners in illegal markets.
• Understanding the role of immigration in transnational crime is crucial for effective policy-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide the first causal estimates of how immigrants and immigration policies influence the scale and patterns of illegal drug trafficking.
• To analyze the impact of immigrant populations on both the import and export of illegal drugs.
• To investigate the potential effects of immigration policy changes, such as legalization, on drug trafficking.

Main Methods:

• Utilized novel microdata on the universe of large illegal drug confiscations in Spain.
• Employed causal inference methods to establish the relationship between immigration and drug trafficking.
• Analyzed the correlation between the number of immigrants from specific origin countries and drug import/export volumes.

Main Results:

• Immigrants were found to increase both the import and export of illegal drugs connected to their countries of origin.
• Irregular immigrants were specifically linked to an increase in illegal drug imports.
• A doubling of immigrants from a particular country increased the likelihood of drug imports from that country by 8 percentage points.

Conclusions:

• Immigration significantly impacts the dynamics of illegal drug trafficking, both in terms of volume and direction.
• The legal status of immigrants appears to play a role, with irregular status potentially exacerbating drug import levels.
• Suggestive evidence indicates that granting legal status to immigrants could serve as a tool to mitigate illegal drug imports.