Fact check: NC congressman ties foreign-born residents to rise in Charlotte crime
A Charlotte-area congressman this week appeared to claim foreign-born residents are responsible for a rise in uptown crime. But research doesn’t support that claim.
U.S. Rep. Pat Harrigan, a Republican who represents North Carolina’s 10th Congressional District, posted Tuesday on his official congressional page on X, formerly Twitter, that “foreign nationals” account for “roughly one in six people” in Charlotte. His post came as U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 370 people in the Charlotte area in a multi-day operation. Border Patrol agents’ presence sparked protests, a surge in school absences and business closures.
“When a city carries numbers like that, it shows up everywhere ... Families feel the strain in housing, in classrooms, and in basic public safety,” Harrigan wrote, claiming murders are on the rise in uptown in addition to aggravated assaults with knives or guns and strong arm-robberies.
Harrigan said that’s the Charlotte the Border Patrol arrived in because “the scale of the population shift and the rise in violent crime” outpaced local agencies’ capabilities.
“A city cannot function when the pressure points stack up like this. Charlotte has to put the safety of its residents first or the numbers will keep getting worse, no matter who pretends otherwise,” he said.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police data show a more complex picture of crime trends in Charlotte. And research has found increased immigration doesn’t typically raise crime levels.
How many foreign-born people live in Charlotte?
Harrigan said in his post, which had more than 149,000 views as of Thursday afternoon, that Charlotte’s population is 900,000 and “more than 150,000 are foreign nationals.”
The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Charlotte’s population was 943,476 in 2024, the most recent figure available. The agency estimates 19.7% of the city’s population was born outside the U.S.
Census data doesn’t break down the foreign-born population based on immigrants’ legal status, but the Census Bureau estimates 33% of Charlotte’s foreign-born residents are naturalized U.S. citizens and 67% are not citizens, which includes legal residents.
Charlotte crime statistics
Harrigan claimed that “Uptown murders are up 200 percent.” He also said “aggravated assaults with knives or guns climbed from 86 to 111 year over year” and “strong-arm robberies went from 26 to 31 in the same period.”
Harrigan’s post neither specified the source nor time frame for his numbers. His spokesperson did not respond to The Charlotte Observer. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police said to file a public records request when asked for comment.
On murders, he is significantly off. In 2023, there were five murders in uptown, according to police data. The next year, there were four. This year, there have been five again, a 25% increase. If Harrigan meant homicides, which include justifiable killings and fatal crashes, he was a little closer to the truth but still not accurate.
Aggravated assaults have trended upward in uptown, but that is not the case for robberies, according to a Charlotte Observer analysis of police incident data spanning from 2017 to the present.
Police documented 85 aggravated assaults in the uptown area as of this time last year, and 106 this year. Aggravated assaults have outpaced the population increase in uptown over the last decade.
Officers documented 57 robberies last year and 55 this year. Over the last decade, the number of robberies has not followed a clear trend.
Citywide, assaults have dropped each of the last four years. Robberies and homicides, like in uptown, have fluctuated. But just comparing this year to last, all of those crimes are down.
CMPD said in its latest quarterly crime report released in mid-October overall crime decreased 8% citywide in the first three quarters of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. CMPD also reported a 20% reduction in violent crime, “which includes homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults which encompass shootings.”
The agency reported a 24% drop in homicides, 19% drop in aggravated assaults and 22% drop in robberies.
Do immigrants impact crime statistics?
Stefanía Arteaga, co-founder and co-executive director of Carolina Migrant Network, called Harrigan’s post “misinformation” and “unfounded talking points for political gain.”
“Charlotteans have seen and have lived through the destruction that CBP has done in our community since Saturday. They don’t need a tweet to tell them what’s going on,” she said.
Years of research has not found a correlation between a rise in immigration and a rise in crime, multiple sources say.
An analysis by the nonprofit American Immigration Council found that from 1980 to 2022, “the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled from, 6.2% to 13.9%, while the total crime rate dropped by 60.4% — from 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people.”
“Specifically, the violent crime rate fell by 34.5% and the property crime rate fell by 63.3%,” the group said.
From 2017 to 2022, the immigrant population grew by 1.7 million in the U.S. while the national total crime rate dropped from 2,758 per 100,000 people to 2,335 per 100,000 people, according to the analysis.
The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, says, “a growing volume of research demonstrates that not only do immigrants commit fewer crimes, but they also do not raise crime rates in the U.S. communities where they settle.”
A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in 2023 found that “as a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years.” The same study found “immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated” than U.S. born residents.
“From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” said Stanford University researcher Ran Abramitzky, one of the authors of the National Bureau of Economic Research study, in 2023.
This story was originally published November 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
