How Unemployment, Inequality, Wages, and Migration Determine Violent Crime in Brazil Between 1980-2000.

I am currently revising a first draft of my paper on "How Unemployment, Inequality, Wages, and Migration Determine Violent Crime in Brazil Between 1980-2000.". There is an extensive literature on the relationship between immigration and criminality. Previous work focusing on the reduced form relationship between the number of migrants and crime has found that areas that receive more migrants see an increase in crime. However, we don't know whether this correlation reflects the fact that migrants are more likely to commit crimes, inequality increases, wages decrease or unemployment increases. The mechanism through which migration affects crime is crucial for public policy. If migrants are more likely to commit crime, then we must address this with a more restrictive migration policy, while if crime increases due to changes in inequality, wages or unemployment can also be addressed with wither migration or labour policies. In this paper I use the 1980 to 2000 Brazilian Census to determine how migration affects the homicide rate in urban areas. In particular, I use variation in the response of high and low skill migrants from rural areas to weather shocks and transportation costs to identify the channel through which migration affects violent crime in urban areas. We find that areas that receive more migrants also see an increase in the number of homicides (consistent with previous studies), yet this is not due to the fact that migrants are more likely to commit crime but because of the  increase in income inequality.