Does immigration increase crime?
Every time I log onto Facebook, old school friends share horror stories about crime waves supposedly driven by immigrants. London, apparently, is now a crime-ridden hell hole plagued by gangs of foreign criminals. Other big cities, we’re told, are heading the same way.
They’re so convinced this is true that it’s almost impossible to have a rational conversation with them.
But is it actually true?
Does immigration increase crime in the UK?
What’s happened to crime?
The simplest place to start is with the crime rate itself.
Crime in England and Wales has been falling in recent years.
You could argue that the fall is due to changes in reporting, changes in law, or the way offences are recorded. That’s fair. But several specific offences that are consistently measured over time also show the same downward trend:
- Homicide decreased by 6% (to 518 offences), the lowest level since modern recording began in 2003
- Knife crime fell 5% (to 51,527 offences)
- Firearms offences fell 16% (to 5,053 offences)
- Robbery dropped 2% overall, with personal robbery falling 12%
- The only clear increases were shoplifting (+13%) and theft from the person (+5%)
That’s hardly a “crime wave”.
What’s happened to immigration?
At the same time, immigration has moved up and down significantly.
I don’t need to lay these two charts on top of each other to see something obvious:
There is no meaningful correlation between immigration and crime.
Even if you assume a time lag between someone arriving and committing a crime, the relationship just doesn’t exist in the data.
Are immigrants more likely to commit crime?
If immigration doesn’t increase crime overall, the next question is obvious:
Are immigrants more likely to commit crime than non-immigrants?
The best way to test this is by looking at convictions and the prison population.
Young men are the most likely group to commit crime, regardless of nationality. And non-citizens in the UK tend to be younger, so raw figures can be misleading if you don’t adjust for age and sex.
Here’s what the data shows:
- In 2024, non-citizens made up around 12% of the adult population
- Non-citizens made up 13% of people receiving convictions
- Non-citizens made up 12.4% of the prison population
Even without adjusting for age, that’s roughly proportional.
Once you control for age and sex, non-citizens are actually underrepresented in the prison population.
In other words:
Immigrants are not more likely to commit crime than native-born citizens.
Would removing immigrants reduce crime?
Technically, if you removed millions of people, you’d reduce the total number of crimes. Crime is committed by people, after all.
But you’d also:
- Shrink the workforce
- Shrink the economy
- Weaken public services
- Push up poverty
And poverty is one of the strongest predictors of crime.
So you might get fewer people… but you’d very likely get:
- More desperation
- More instability
- More crime per capita
In other words, less immigration is not some magic bullet for public safety. It’s more like shooting yourself in the foot and then wondering why walking got harder.
The real takeaway
Those lurid Facebook posts about migrant crime waves?
They’re nonsense. Unsupported by evidence. Fuelled by fear, not facts.
But I doubt that matters to the people sharing them.
And yes, it’s true that some parts of London are now “no-go areas” for people like me.
Not because of crime.
Because they’re so fucking expensive.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/immigration-system-statistics-data-tables
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077
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