When youth crime dominates public attention, the political response is often to hand down tougher sanctions, scale up policing, and lower the age of criminal responsibility. Examples include Sweden’s recent move to prosecute children as young as 13 for serious offences (Pedersen 2026) and Europol’s establishment of an operational taskforce to counter the recruitment of young perpetrators into criminal networks (Europol 2024, 2025). While media coverage and policy debates focus heavily on law enforcement measures, calls for prevention funding (for example, investments in high-quality childcare and education, mental healthcare, and youth services) receive comparatively little attention. Evidence suggests, however, that early prevention may be especially effective at reducing crime over the long term (Costa et al. 2018, Hyman et al. 2022).

Indeed, there is an argument to be made that prevention should start as early as possible. In our recent paper (Andres et al. 2026), we analyse a policy intervention that starts at birth. Specifically, we ask whether it is possible to reduce youth crime by granting birthright citizenship to children from immigrant families.

The potential for early interventions to reduce youth crime is particularly salient for children from immigrant backgrounds, who often navigate the dual pressures of integrating into the host society while maintaining ties to their parents’ country of origin. Policies that grant rights and recognition from birth – such as citizenship – can shape identity formation, strengthen social trust, and enhance perceived opportunities for education, employment, and civic participation, factors frequently discussed in the literature as mechanisms for preventing criminal activity (e.g. Lochner and Moretti 2004, Putnam 2000). By fostering a sense of belonging and opportunity early in life, birthright citizenship may reduce the appeal of delinquent pathways and promote positive social and economic integration, thereby serving as a preventive tool against youth crime.

Analysing a rare citizenship law reform in Germany, we evaluate whether granting birthright citizenship to children from immigrant families can reduce youth crime. We find that acquiring citizenship at birth alters the life trajectory of second- and third-generation immigrant youth, yielding a sizeable 70% reduction in their likelihood of engaging in criminal activity during adolescence.

Birthright citizenship reform

On 15 July 11999, the German government passed a reform amending the country’s Citizenship and Nationality Law. Children born prior to the reform cutoff date of 1 January 2000 were given citizenship at birth if at least one parent was a German citizen (jus sanguinis). Children born after 1 January 2000 were automatically granted conditional citizenship at birth if at least one parent had been a legal resident for at least eight years (jus soli). Prior work finds that this reform increased the likelihood of citizenship at birth by 52 percentage points for second-generation immigrant children (Felfe et al. 2020, Rainer et al. 2020).

To study the effect of this reform, we collected administrative data on police-reported crimes in the German federal states Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, and Berlin, which together account for a quarter of Germany’s population and have some of the highest immigrant shares. Our dataset combines microdata underlying German Police Crime Statistics (2012–2020) with unpublished operational police records which capture offense type, date, location, and suspects’ month of birth, gender, and nationality. 

Empirical design

A standard evaluation of the reform would compare youth criminal activity among second and third generation immigrant children born just before versus just after 1 January 2000 (potentially taking an additional difference using immigrant children born just before versus just after 1 January 1999 to net out season-of-birth effects). However, one limitation of the data is that while an individual’s citizenship is recorded in the crime data, their immigration background is not; hence, once an individual is granted German citizenship, we cannot identify whether they have an immigrant background.

To address this issue, we exploit a simple observation: the 2000 reform ‘switches’ the citizenship status of affected children from non-German to German at birth. As illustrated in Figure 1, this generates a mechanical decline in the reported number of crimes attributed to non-Germans at the reform cutoff since there are now fewer of them (depicted by the drop in the solid black line). If birthright citizenship does not affect criminal behaviour, we should observe a corresponding increase in the number of crimes attributed to Germans (depicted by the dotted grey line). If, instead, birthright citizenship reduces youth crime, the post-reform increase among Germans should be smaller than predicted by the dotted grey line, which is what we see in the figure. 

We implement this design idea by summing up two difference-in-differences models. These difference-in-differences models estimate the change in the number of crimes separately for Germans and for non-Germans born from January to June 2000 compared to July 1999 to December 1999, i.e. after and before the reform threshold, while netting out respective season of births effects using the same groups born one year earlier. Our crime outcome is the cumulative number of crimes recorded for a birth-month cohort between ages 14 and 19. The sum of the two difference-in-differences estimators would be zero if the reform had no effect, while it would be negative if the reform lowered crime.

Figure 1 The impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime

Notes: Aggregate number of crimes by month of birth for Germans and non-Germans (after accounting for seasonal effects using data from the previous birth cohort born from July 1998 to June 1999).  The solid lines depict the 6-month average before and after the reform.  The vertical line represents the cutoff for the birthright citizenship reform.

Findings

Employing this novel empirical approach, our work yields several key findings:

• Granting birthright citizenship has a significant crime-reducing effect: Immigrant youth who acquire citizenship at birth are 70% less likely to engage in criminal activity.

The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications. The magnitude of the effect is generally larger than alternative strategies which have been proposed to reduce youth crime, such as summer job programmes (Kessler et al. 2022).

• The crime-reducing effect is exclusively driven by boys, with the effect for girls being positive.

This finding is consistent with Rainer et al. (2020), who show that the birthright citizenship reform reduced life satisfaction and lowered integration and educational attainment for girls (but not boys), arguably because treated girls were pushed by parents to conform to traditional culture. Since boys commit crimes at substantially higher rates, they drive the overall effect.

• The reform had a stronger impact in counties with a higher share of jus soli births.

The fact that the effect is strongest in areas with a higher share of treated children provides further evidence that the results reflect reform effects and are not explained by confounding trends.

Concluding remarks

Crime imposes substantial costs on society (Bindler et al. 2020, Bindler and Ketel 2022). While policymakers often respond to youth crime with tougher policing, our analysis shows that an intervention at the very beginning of life—birthright citizenship—can have a powerful effect on reducing in youth delinquency. This finding is particularly relevant in light of ongoing debates in the U.S. about abolishing birthright citizenship.

References

Andres, L, S Bauernschuster, G B Dahl, H Rainer and S Schüller (2026), “Birthright citizenship and youth crime,” NBER Working Paper No. 35070.

Bindler A and N Ketel (2022), “The far-reaching consequences of becoming a victim of crime”, VoxEU.org, 6 February.

Bindler, A, N Ketel and R Hjalmarsson (2020), “Costs of victimization,” in Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, 1-31.

Costa, R, S Machin and B Bell (2018) “Why education reduces crime”, VoxEU.org, 14 October.

Europol (2024), “The recruitment of young perpetrators for criminal networks,” Intelligence Notification 2024-033. 

Europol (2025), “Operational Taskforce GRIMM: 193 arrests in 6 months tackling violence-as-a-service networks,” News, 8 December. 

Felfe, C, H Rainer, and J Saurer (2020) “Why birthright citizenship matters for immigrant youth: Short- and long-run impacts of educational integration,” Journal of Labor Economics 38(1): 143–182.

Hyman, J, B Vasquez and J Baron (2022), “Public school funding, school quality, and adult crime”, VoxEU.org, 4 June.

Kessler, J B, S Tahamont, A Gelber and A Isen (2022), “The Effects of Youth Employment on Crime: Evidence from New York City Lotteries,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 41: 710-730. 

Lochner, L and E Moretti (2004), “The effect of education on crime: Evidence from prison inmates, arrests, and self-reports”, American Economic Review 94(1): 155-189.

Pedersen, M (2026), “Sweden Will Lower the Age of Criminal Responsibility to 13 for Serious Crimes,” NordiskPost, 1 February. 

Putnam, R D (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster.

Rainer, H, C Felfe, P Frijters and G B Dahl (2020), “Unintended consequences of birth-right citizenship for immigrant girls”, VoxEU.org, 10 May.