Objectives To test the “Trump Hypothesis”: whether immigrants are responsible for higher levels of violent and drug‐related crime in the United States, as asserted by Donald Trump in his 2015 presidential campaign announcement. This is achieved using recent crime and immigration data, thus testing the common public perception linking immigrants to crime, and providing an updated assessment of the immigrant‐crime nexus.

Methods Rates of violent crime and drug arrests by state are pooled for 2012–2014. These are compared against pooled statistics on foreign‐born and Mexican nationals living in the United States, as well as estimates of undocumented foreign and undocumented Mexican population by state. The data are analyzed using correlation and multivariate regressions.

Results Data uniformly show no association between immigrant population size and increased violent crime. However, there appears to be a small but significant association between undocumented immigrant populations and drug‐related arrests.