Majority of Public Believes Migration Leads to More Crime

May 19, 2024

The majority of the British public thinks that migration is correlated with a rise in crime while just three per cent believe that it results in a reduction of crime, a survey found.

Amid increasing calls for the UK government to publish data on the criminality of migrants and asylum seekers by nationality, a poll from YouGov has found that 56 per cent of the public believe that migration “usually leads to more crime”.

Conversely, just 3 per cent said migration brings down crime, while 28 per cent said that they think it “usually makes no difference” and a further 13 per cent said they were unsure.

Some of the picture can be gleaned from looking at prison statistics, which found that people professing Muslim faith and those registered as so-called BAME (Black, Asian, Minority, Ethnic) people are overrepresented in the prison population. Jail statistics also show the stark increase in the Albanian prisoner population in Britain, which over the past decade has increased from 212 in 2013 to 1,475 last year.

As of June of last year, 10,321 foreigners were incarcerated in England and Wales, representing 12 per cent of all inmates in the British prison population.

However, while the Home Office keeps records on the ethnicity of those arrested in Britain, it refuses to publish a full breakdown of crimes by nationality. The department also does not disclose to the public whether prisoners are in the country legally or if they are alleged asylum seekers.

Denmark - which has some of the strictest immigration controls in Europe — is, by contrast, far more open with its statistics. The country, for instance, releases a full breakdown of foreign criminality to the public.

According to an analysis of official figures from the Danish government tracking crimes between 2010 and 2021, over 40 foreign nationalities were more likely on a per capita basis to commit crimes than native Danes, with migrants from Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Somalia, and Uganda topping the crime tables.