Migrants and crime

There is a belief, originating mainly from right-wing media (such as pro-Kremlin ones), that migrants are inclined to commit more crimes than the indigenous population of a country, and that an increase in the number of migrants or refugees leads to a rise in crime. For instance, Ren-TV reports that “migrants are raping Europe”¹, political analyst Evgeny Satanovsky claims that because of migrants, Europe faces a “great massacre”², and so on. As a rule, isolated cases are cited as confirmation. Do migrants truly possess any different characteristics in this sense (we have already debunked racist stereotypes previously) than other people, and does an increase in their numbers lead to a rise in crime?

A study by Donato Di Carlo (research fellow at the Max Planck Institute), Julia Schulte-Cloos (PhD at the European University Institute), and Giulia Saudelli (former journalist for Associated Press and CNBC), based on data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics, shows that with the arrival of a large number of migrants, there was no increase in the crime rate, for example, in Italy³. During the period from 2007 to 2016, the number of crimes committed in the country per 1,000 inhabitants decreased by 25%.

At the same time, since 2013, the share of individuals who have received asylum in the country has increased almost exponentially.

Over the same period, the average regional crime rate among foreigners in Italy decreased by approximately 65%, and this occurred in all regions of Italy from 2014 onwards, from the northern tip of the country in the Alps to the southernmost point on Lampedusa. Furthermore, as Amnesty International noted, 95% of reports about migrant crimes from Italian politicians were written by right-wing politicians — 50% by members of Lega, 27% by members of Fratelli d’Italia, and 18% by members of Forza Italia⁴.

The New York Times cited data from the German Federal Criminal Police Office, according to which migrants make up about 10 percent of Germany’s population, while in crime statistics they account for only 6 percent, and in cases of sexual assault — 5 percent⁵. Deutsche Welle reported, firstly, on a study by Münster criminologist Christian Walburg, which debunked the link between national origin and crime, and secondly, on data from criminologist Sandra Bucerius of the University of Alberta, who investigated the link between migration and crime in Canada and claims that “immigration tends to lower the crime rate in a country, not raise it”⁶. In 2018, the deputy chairman of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party claimed that in 2017, illegal immigrants in the country committed 447 murders; however, the real figure, according to the German Interior Ministry, was 27 cases — the figure of 447 was achieved by substituting data on illegal migrants with data on migrants in general (including legal ones)⁷.

Russian media especially love to create hype around any crime involving migrants in Scandinavian countries. This was noted by Moskovsky Komsomolets correspondent Elizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina:

Is it true that crime has grown colossally due to migrants, that Swedish women are afraid to leave their homes in the evenings, and that gangs of robbers with bats roam the streets after dark? The headlines in the Russian media are such that it seems as if it is the end of the world: “Raped Sweden”, “Sweden held hostage by migrants”, “Gangs of migrant rapists have intimidated Sweden”, “The end of the Swedish idyll: migrants are killing and raping”… In reality, Sweden remains one of the safest countries in the world, and the crime rate does not exceed the statistics of a decade ago: the number of crimes among the indigenous population has decreased, while newcomers have returned to previous indicators. However, Swedes are little concerned about crime among migrants, as most often these are ethnic clashes that do not affect them, drug and arms trafficking (which, again, are used against each other).

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Swedish media often have to debunk Russian fakes. Here one can encounter headlines like: “Why Sweden is NOT the world capital of violence”; “No, a man eating bacon was not convicted in Sweden” (our channels showed a segment on how a Stockholm resident who insulted Muslim women by eating bacon was sentenced to a fine for incitement); “Here is the proof that Christmas garlands were not banned in Sweden” (this news about the fact that city Christmas decorations were banned in “Muslim-occupied” Sweden was also spread by our news agency)… Russian journalists also became infamous in Rinkeby when they tried to bribe local kids to stage riots “on camera”⁸.

In fact, Kremlin-controlled media are constantly launching “fakes” about the lawlessness of migrants in Sweden (however, not only about this). For example, “Vzglyad”⁹, “Komsomolskaya Pravda”¹⁰ and several other Russian media outlets¹¹ published an article in 2020 stating that “Swedes are being expelled from Sweden” under pressure from a certain “Arab Party”. As an investigation by a Swedish fact-checking group showed, the entire incident consisted of the fact that the “party”, apparently consisting of a single individual, was writing extremist slogans in a Facebook group of 400 people¹². In 2019, Ren-TV reported that a Christmas concert on television in Sweden was canceled so as not to offend migrants who do not hold Christian beliefs¹³. As the Swedish publication The Local reported, this is a fabrication — the concert was canceled due to contract issues¹⁴. And there is a huge number of such examples of disinformation from Russian media. In reality, violent crimes in Sweden are not a common occurrence, which is confirmed, for example, by the share of deaths related to homicide — in Sweden, it is 0.13%, while in Russia it is 1.18%¹⁵:

In Russia itself, there is also no increased crime rate caused by migrants. In 2019, 12 million migrants lived in the RF¹⁶ (the country ranks third in the world by the number of migrants) out of a total population of 146.7 million people as of January 1, 2020¹⁷ — this is 8.2%. At the same time, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, foreign persons and stateless persons committed 3.6% of all solved crimes in January-March 2020¹⁸. A similar percentage, with a small margin of error, has been observed in previous years¹⁹. Despite this, Russian media are trying to publish “fakes” about the rise in crime among migrants in Russia as well — recently, these fabrications were debunked by The Insider²⁰.

A similar picture is observed in other countries. For example, Carlos III University of Madrid conducted its own study, which revealed that the crime rate in Spain grew much slower than the number of migrants²¹. Graham Ousey from the Department of Sociology at the College of William & Mary and Charis Kubrin from the Department of Criminology at the University of California concluded in their study that the link between migration and crime is extremely insignificant²². A study by the journalistic organization The Marshall Project, which specializes in studying criminal justice in the USA, contains the conclusion that “the link between immigration and crime exists only in the minds of Americans, and nowhere else”²³ (the journalists did not take into account the imagination of Russians and citizens of many other countries).

The Marshall Project study notes that from 1980 to 2016, in most regions, the number of immigrants increased by 57–183%. Meanwhile, the change in the level of violent crime fluctuated from a 43% decrease to a 6% increase, often with a downward trend toward the 2000s. In places with a sharp increase in the immigrant population, the crime rate did not increase more often than in places where immigration was moderate or absent altogether. On average, from 1980 to 2016, the immigrant population grew by 137 percent, while the average crime rate decreased by 12 percent during the same period.

The libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, generally acknowledged that the crime rate among migrants (both “legal” and illegal) in the state of Texas is lower than that of native-born residents²⁴. A study in the journal Criminology proved that undocumented immigration in the USA does not lead to an increase in violent crimes and is more likely associated with a slight reduction in them²⁵; this is also confirmed by The New York Times²⁶. A large-scale study by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, compared immigration levels with crime rates in 200 metropolitan areas over the past few decades and also revealed a decrease in crime rates despite the increase in the number of migrants²⁷. As The New York Times notes, the right-wing American politician Donald Trump most frequently called cities where he was at odds with local political leaders “hotbeds of migration, drugs, and crime”, despite the fact that a decrease in crime rates was observed there alongside the growth of migration²⁸.

Conclusion

As we can see, numerous studies, scientific data, and journalistic investigations by various publications show that there is no link between migration and crime, i.e., it is not the growth of migration that increases the crime rate. Instead, the myth of criminal migrants is constantly and universally used by right-wing populists who deceive citizens to create the appearance of political work (instead of engaging in real political work and professional solutions to the country’s problems) and to obtain easy political dividends.

This does not mean that social democrats cannot limit migration and cannot regulate it. Social democrats cannot allow uncontrolled migration to threaten the provision of jobs for citizens, cannot allow the creation of conservative ethnic enclaves, and so on, which we discussed in the part of the Progressive Course concerning the migration issue.

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