For over two decades, Charis Kubrin, UC Irvine professor of criminology, law and society, has examined how the presence of immigrants in communities affects public safety. Her findings continually challenge a myth that has persisted throughout history: that immigrants bring crime to their new countries. In November 2025, Kubrin learned that she’s one of two researchers who’ll receive the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for 2026 – a recognition often seen as equivalent to the Nobel Prize in that field. During the official announcement, the competition jury noted that the 2026 award is “shining the spotlight on how criminology is myth-busting on immigration and rehabilitation.” In the latest episode of The UC Irvine Podcast, Kubrin will share her reaction when she learned about the prestigious honor, explain her life’s work and how it’s particularly relevant in today’s global climate, and address the rigors of trying to bridge the gap between scientific research and public understanding. “A Caring Friend,” the music for this episode, was provided by Bad Snacks via the audio library in YouTube Studio. To get the latest episodes of The UC Irvine Podcast delivered automatically, subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Spotify. TRANSCRIPT Cara Capuano/The UC Irvine Podcast: From the University of California Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UC Irvine Podcast. Our guest on the first UC Irvine Podcast for 2026 is Charis Kubrin, UC Irvine professor of criminology, law and society. In November 2025, it was announced that Professor Kubrin was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. It’s considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the field. Kubrin’s recognition for this prestigious honor comes after many years of research that examine how immigrants impact public safety. In the face of rhetoric that suggests immigrants bring crime to their new communities, Kubrin has found that the opposite is true: immigrants actually have lower crime rates than native-born populations and may help reduce crime in their communities. Kubrin shares the 2026 Stockholm Award with Mark Lipsey of Vanderbilt University. Lipsey’s research demonstrates how rehabilitation programs can reduce crime rates for convicted offenders. Thank you for joining us today, Professor Kubrin. Kubrin: I am really excited to be here. Thank you. Capuano: First, I’d love to congratulate you for being named a winner of the Stockholm Award in Criminology. What was it like learning the news about the award? Kubrin: Well, first of all, thank you. My initial reaction was surprise. This was something that was never on my radar, just not really crossing my mind that that was even potentially happening. And to get that phone call, I was thrilled, but very surprised. And then slowly as the news sunk in, I felt just very grateful. A lot of my academic heroes have received this prize over the years, including a former UCI professor Joan Petersilia, in our department, who later went to Stanford. So, yeah: excited, surprised, grateful, all of it. Capuano: Let’s go further into detail about your specific research. I gave a very brief outline of your work, but how do you describe what you do? Kubrin: It’s been described in a lot of different ways, and then I’ll come to how I describe it. Well, a lot of people think I “myth bust” what we know about how immigration and crime are related. I see myself as bringing science to the issue of immigration and crime, which is politically charged and always under scrutiny and, you know, a major part of public opinion and public discussion today, but always essentially. So, my goal in doing this work – and I’ve been doing it for 20/25 years now – is to make sure that science and research remain a fundamental part of any discussions, particularly when those discussions lead to policy and practice in our society. Capuano: As you mentioned, there is a real science to criminology. So, what does that look like when you investigate your topic? Kubrin: Right. Well, so first of all, we’re a social science. That means we’re also a science. A lot of people assume, “Oh, well, it’s not a quote unquote hard science. They’re not doing science-based work,” – but many of us are, and that’s important. These are not our feelings about immigration and crime. These are not my hunches about immigration crime. These are actual studies that I and so many others in the field have done that examine a number of questions. For instance, do immigrants exhibit lower offending rates compared to their native-born counterparts? That’s what we would call an individual-level question about immigrant status and offending levels. But we also ask questions at a more macro-level, like what happens to crime rates in communities where immigrants move into, for example. Or, in communities where there are higher concentrations of immigrants, what can we say about crime rates there compared to, say, communities with lower numbers of immigrants? So, we use crime data. We use often census data. We run regression models. I care about all of the sort of scientific principles that go into doing that kind of research and all of the studies I and so many others have done. Capuano: Thank you for breaking that down for us. You were chosen from an international group of nominees for the Stockholm Award. The study of criminology is certainly a global endeavor. What kind of collaborations are you involved in? You’ve described so much already. Kubrin: Well, so this is the really important thing, which is: the Stockholm Prize is super meaningful to me individually, but what I’m very excited about is what this means for the field in general, but particularly the subfield of immigration crime studies. There are so many scholars who are doing important work in this area, too many to name here. But as a cohort – as a community of scholars – our research, whether we’re using data from one decade or another, whether we’re measuring crime this way or that way, whether we’re focusing on this immigrant group or that immigrant group – sort of you name it – we’re all generally finding the same things across our body of research with some nuance. And so, in many ways, the fact that this prize is awarded to me in this particular year and in this current context, which is not lost on me. You know, personal achievement, but also it means a lot because there are so many scholars doing such important work on this, including at UC Irvine – so many different departments: my home department, criminology, law and society, but also the Department of Sociology, the Department of Anthropology, and the law school. We have so many folks studying immigration and doing this kind of myth-busting work because there are so many misconceived, or I should say, misaligned perceptions around immigrants and their impact in society. Capuano: As you mentioned earlier, you have put decades of work and your time into studying this particular focus, the topic of immigrants and crime. What initially motivated you to make this your research focus? Kubrin: You know, that’s a common question I get, and I like it. A lot of people assume, you know, I come from a family of immigrants. I’m not an immigrant. My parents aren’t immigrants, but my grandparents were, at least on my mother’s side, and I’m married to an immigrant. And so, a lot of people assume it was a personal choice or interest to get into this research area, but that’s actually not how it happened for me. How I got interested in this area was back in the early 2000s, I came across an op-ed that was written by a criminologist. It was published in The New York Times, I think it was 2005, around his work where he proposed in this op-ed, that one reason why we were at the time seeing the declines in crime rates in cities all across the United States maybe be because we’re seeing increases in immigration to those places. So basically, he was arguing what help explains the crime drop is increased immigration. And I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting argument.” I didn’t know anything about it at the time. And when I spoke with him about the findings and the paper that he was referencing in the op-ed, he mentioned that he was receiving a lot of hate mail. People just could not fathom that immigrants could bring lower crime rates. I mean, the assumption was, “Of course, they’re going to bring crime.” And I started looking into the research in this area, and there was some at the time showing consistent with what he had found in his own scholarship: immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than their native-born counterparts. And immigration to an area can cause crime to go down rather than up. At the same time, I noticed a plethora of studies showing just the opposite when it comes to public perception. People believe immigration and crime go hand in hand despite this evidence and that gap – that initial frustration over what we know from the science versus what people believe to be true – really motivated me and spurred me to get doing research in this area. And not just conducting the studies but also making sure that the findings make their way out to the people that matter, whether it’s policymakers, voters – you name it. And so, I’ve done a lot of outreach over the years around this issue in terms of educating the public about what we know from the studies. Capuano: You brought up all of the evidence, all of the studies. So why then does this myth persist that the presence of immigrants in a community means more crime? Kubrin: Yeah, to that point of the consistency of the findings, it’s not just the studies individually and their findings. My longtime collaborator and good friend and I have been working on this for years – his name is Graham Ousey, he’s at the College of William and Mary. We published a meta-analysis, which is a systematic quantitative analysis of an existing body of research, which arrived at the conclusion that across the studies there is effectively no relationship between immigration and crime. It’s a null relationship. When there is a significant relationship, it’s negative. So, more immigration equals less crime. And then a few years later, we published a book on that that reviewed sort of – in a more granular focus – all of these studies. So, this is the (laughs) – this is the accepted findings in the field. So, just to kind of lay that foundation there, because I think it really is important. So then, the million dollar question comes, as you ask, “Well, why? Why do people believe the opposite?” And, you know, I teach a course at UC Irvine called “Immigration, Crime, Law and Victimization Around the Globe.” And this is something that we discuss as a class every quarter that I teach it. And it ranges from, if you look at the history of immigration and immigration policy in this country – but also around the globe – there’s always been this assumption and perception around immigration as problematic in society. And whether it’s immigrants bring crime, or immigrants cause the erosion of the foundations of our society, or immigrants are lazy, or they steal our jobs. There’s a lot of stereotypes – crime is just one of them. And historically that’s often been the case, regardless of which immigrant group we’re talking about or which historical time period we’re talking about. So, there’s xenophobia and just concerns about how immigrants will erode American culture, for example. And that’s pretty standard. We have issues of race and racism in this country, particularly with most recent immigrants, arriving largely from Latin America or Asia, with darker skin and other markers that link sort of racial and ethnic stereotypes with immigrants. We have a general issue of devaluing research and science on key issues that affect society. Take climate change, for example, or global warming. We know that evidence is pretty solid on that, but some people continue to call it a hoax. So, there’s that challenge. And I think the devaluation of expertise in our society is part of the puzzle. You know, and I can go on and on. It’s a multifaceted problem and concern. For academia’s part in all of this, historically, we have not done a great job moving beyond the walls of academia. We’re often talking to each other in our echo chambers. And it’s very important that the research not stay in the journals but make its way to the public. And that’s our role to make sure that happens. Capuano: It feels like the focus on this has intensified in recent years – that’s me as a citizen. But I want to ask my researcher, “ask the expert,” am I wrong in perceiving it that way? Or what have you seen? Kubrin: Yes and no. So, it’s absolutely right now, especially this moment in time – this very day we’re doing this interview, right? If you look at what’s been going on just the last week, but really for the last several years, we see a real intensification of this issue. I think Donald Trump ran an entire election on this issue. And that was one of the main reasons, in my opinion, that he was elected, was people’s concerns about foreigners in this country. And the border crisis. And my air quotes are here because to what extent these are true problems versus moral panics about an issue – we can debate for quite a while. But I say, “Yes and no,” because again, if you look back on the history of immigration in this country and immigration policy, there’s often been moments in our history – more than moments, long periods in our history – where our policies and practices around immigration can be seen as harsh, restrictive, and exclusionary. I show this political cartoon in one of my classes. It’s the Statue of Liberty holding a sign up. And this is how I characterize, sort of, the history of immigration policy in the country – in one picture, in one political cartoon. Statue of Liberty, holding up a sign that says, “Welcome, immigrants.” And then that’s crossed off, and then it says, “Go home.” And then that’s crossed off, and then it says, “Welcome, immigrants.” Right? And so on and so forth. The idea being that our country is quite ambivalent about immigrants and the role of immigrants in our society. We need them for the economy. We consider ourselves a diverse, multicultural, multi-ethnic society. The founding, if you will, of the United States (laughs)… immigration was a fundamental part of that. But at other times, we have very restrictive policies that raise the question, the ultimate question – what all of this is all about – is who gets to be here, who belongs and who doesn’t? Those sort of questions underlie, I think, all of the issues and analyses that we can do. It’s about who deserves to be here, who gets to be here, who doesn’t. Capuano: Those are very important questions. I have one now: what is the “immigration revitalization theory?” Kubrin: That is a relatively new theory that emphasizes the positive contributions that immigrants make to their communities, including