They are convicted and incarcerated at consistently lower rates than people born in the United States — and have been for 150 years.

Texas is the only state that records the immigration status of everyone it arrests and convicts, which makes it the cleanest natural experiment in the country. In 2019, Texas convicted 1,190 native-born Americans per 100,000 native-born residents. For undocumented immigrants the rate was 749 per 100,000 — 37 percent lower. Legal immigrants were lower still, at 510.

The pattern holds for the most serious offense. Over the ten years from 2013 to 2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas was 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans and 2.2 for undocumented immigrants. In 2022, undocumented immigrants were about 7.1 percent of the Texas population and 5 percent of the people convicted of homicide.

This is not a Texas quirk or a recent development. Economists at Stanford, Princeton and Northwestern built the first nationally representative incarceration series running from 1870 to 2020. Immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born in every census for 150 years, and the gap has widened since 1960. Today immigrants are about 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than US-born men.

The honest caveat: conviction data measures what the justice system does, not everything that happens. But it is the same instrument applied to both groups, and every time it is applied, it points the same direction.