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Abstract

The Syrian civil war produced a sudden and policy-driven inflow of refugees into Turkey. This paper examines how that inflow reshaped regional crime by altering the balance between informal employment and the state’s capacity to enforce the law. Using quasi-random variation in initial refugee placement and applying difference-in-differences, trajectory balancing, and causal forest methods, we find no effect on violent crime but a clear rise in non-violent property crime in high-exposure regions. The causal forest results show that these increases are concentrated in provinces with high pre-existing informality and weak fiscal capacity, underscoring the institutional rather than behavioral origins of the crime response. High-exposure regions also experienced higher unemployment among natives and a marked expansion of informal work. We develop a structural framework in which enforcement resources are financed through the formal tax base. As refugee inflows push employment into informality, the tax base contracts, enforcement capacity weakens, and the expected cost of opportunistic crime falls. The findings show how refugee inflows in economies with large informal sectors can erode state capacity and reshape the crime environment without increasing crime among refugees themselves.

Authors

Antonia Gkergki (University of Texas at Arlington)
Syed Muhammad Ishraque Osman (Sacred Heart University, Business Analytics and Applied AI)
Nicholas R. Pusateri, corresponding author (Sacred Heart University, Economics)

Citation

Gkergki, Antonia, Syed Muhammad Ishraque Osman, and Nicholas R. Pusateri. 2025. Invisible Labor, Visible Consequences: Evidence from the Syrian Refugee Settlement in Turkey. Available at: https://nicpusateri.com/invisible-labor

@article{gkergki_osman_pusateri_2025_invisible,
  title={Invisible Labor, Visible Consequences: Evidence from the Syrian Refugee Settlement in Turkey},
  author={Gkergki, Antonia and Osman, Syed Muhammad Ishraque and Pusateri, Nicholas R.},
  journal={Working Paper},
  year={2025},
  url={https://nicpusateri.com/invisible-labor}
}