“Britain is being swamped by immigrants from alien cultures that are backward in their treatment of women” said Robert Jenrick, UK Conservative Party leadership contender and Home Office minister in the last Conservative government in a reference to migration from Muslim majority countries. Ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum vote in the UK when immigration debates assumed almost hysterical levels, Nigel Farage, leader then of UKIP and now of Reform UK argued that: “the free movement of peoples in Europe has become the free movement of criminals, Kalashnikovs”. Delving into the realms of the utterly fantastical, Trump on his third and successful (for the second occasion), claimed that countries all over the world are releasing inmates from their prisons and mental asylums and sending them to the US and, perhaps most infamously absurd, he repeated a post on X/Twitter that Haitians were eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Ever since Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 when he loudly proclaimed the incompatibility of New Commonwealth immigrants (those from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent ) with England and the English culture), debates on immigration where the focus becomes one the subjects of crime, integration and (since 9/11 especially) or terrorism have been particularly toxic. This is because they touch on and are exploited by protagonists such as Trump and Reform UK on sensitive matters of culture and identity which liberal democracies are often ill equipped to deal with and resolve. Figures are tossed around willy-nilly and events such as the “grooming gangs” cases of child sexual exploitation involving predominantly males of South Asian heritage and recently lone attacks by migrants/asylum seekers on German civilians are exploited by bad actors on the far right of politics to create hatred and violent disorder. In such climates rational discussion and evidence-based policies can appear well-nigh impossible. I hope that this article can enable both.
The most common source of concern about immigration and crime relates to the apparent overrepresentation of some immigrant and minority groups in criminal activities. Particularly in the US, illegal immigrants are often seen as a crime liability, because their underground, marginal lifestyles supposedly push them into crime to survive. In Europe, alongside fears that some migrant-origin Muslim minorities are terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, exist concerns that misguided and racially prejudiced about ‘loose Western women’ among young Muslims award them a ‘moral licence’ to provoke, harass or sexually assault non-Muslim women in the street. [1] This narrative has taken on an especially potent form in the UK in the case of the afore-mentioned “grooming gangs” controversy.
To take some of the heat and emotion of debates around crime and immigration links, we must turn to the expertise of Hein de Haas. In his path-breaking and magisterial study of migration patterns, he in Myth 12, tackles head on the contention that immigration sends crime rates soaring. He starts out by issuing a health warning about the other variables that affect crime rates and thus the relationship between immigration and crime – such as unemployment, income and education, as well as social control, cohesion and trust in communities. So, when immigrants settle in urban neighbourhoods with preexisting higher crime rates, correlations between immigration and crime become spurious. And as young men commit most crimes, an over-representation of migrants in crime statistics may just reflect the fact that many migrants are young men.[2] Yet this reality may reinforce the nativist fears about the presence of young single foreign men that are voiced any time in any community where it is proposed to temporarily house recently arrived migrants pending decision on their status.
Immigration and Crime
To disprove the false connection so often made by malevolent figures such as Trump and Farage between immigration and rising crime, De Haas marshals high-quality studies by sociologists and criminologists on the relation between changes in immigration rates and changes in crime rates in the same geographical units (say neighbourhoods, municipalities, states or countries) over time. The best research on this topic has been performed in the US. There, most studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the native-born, despite their lower levels of educational attainment and lower wages. If immigrants become involved in crime, it is non-violent crime such as crime and burglary – particularly among unemployed and poor immigrants – and they are substantially under-represented in violent crimes such as aggravated assault, rape and murder. One study found that, among men between 18 and 39 years of age, rates of imprisonment among the foreign-born were one-quarter of the native-born.[3]
Contrary to the Trump uber-slander, Harvard University criminologist Robert Simpson found that Mexican Americans living in Chicago neighbourhoods were 45 per cent less likely to commit violence than third-generation native-born Americans. He attributes this undermining of the ‘criminal alien stereotype’ to the positive effect immigration has on the ability of neighbourhood communities to organise social control based on shared values. Likewise, this crime reducing effect of immigration is a an explanatory factor in why crime rates in cities such as Los Angeles, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix dropped in times of high immigration; and why places of intense immigration; like New York and cities on the Mexican border, such as El Paso and San Diego, are actually some of the safest cities in the US.[4]
In comparison to the United States, evidence is patchier, but where it is available it delivers an equally rebuff to the notion that immigration increases violent crime. One major analysis of national-level data from twenty-one European countries found no relationship between immigration levels and the incidence of rape, sexual assault and homicide. Another analysis of trends of immigration and crime across England between 1971 and 2002 concluded that, as has been found in the US, neighbourhoods actually tend to become safer as more immigrants arrive. It found that crime is appreciably lower in ethnic enclaves where immigrants make up at least 20 to 30 per cent of the population with this crime-reducing effect found to be particularly large in ethnic enclaves with concentrations of the same ethnic background, presumably due to the social control and security that such communities can afford, thereby refuting the ‘ghetto’ stereotype of such enclaves.[5]
Thus, it is fairly easy to logically refute claims that immigration leads to steep spikes in crime rates. For immigrants typically have lower crime rates as immigrants, likely as they are to come from a segment of rather ‘exceptional people’ with particular attitudes and mindsets that make for predispositions towards aspiration and determination to succeed rather than criminality. Because of the logistics involved in migration in terms of cost, risk, planning and willpower; migrants are most unlikely to risk newly and expensively acquired residency and citizenship status through involvement in crime. Contrary to the ‘social disorganisation’ and delinquency theories about immigration of foreign workers from Catholic countries such as Ireland and Italy promulgated by US sociologists in the early 20th century, migrant workers typically cone from socially conservative, community-oriented and religious backgrounds, and are imbued with traditional values of solidarity, respect and a work ethic.[6]
“The Illegals”
Almost counter-intuitively (in the minds of the Trumpians and Faragistes maybe), the above determinants apply even more to a particularly demonised category of migrant – the ‘illegal immigrant’. Because permanent residency or citizenship is an even more prized objective for the ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’, the incentive to stay out of trouble is all the greater as any contact with the police leading to arrest risks deportation and the loss of all resources that went into their migration journeys. Therefore it is not surprising that the massive increase in immigrant detention and deportation by the US federal government has had no appreciable effect on crime rates (not that we can expect that such evidence will lead to any rethink of Donald Trump’s “largest ever deportation programme in the history of the United States”). Several studies by the sociologist Michael Light, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, disprove comprehensively the popular association between illegal migration and rising crime levels. One study analysing data from across all US states between 1990 and 2014 found that the size of the undocumented migrant population in a state does not increase crime and postulated a possible slight crime-reducing effect.[7]
Using individual data on arrests from the Texas Department of Public Safety between 2012 and 2018, Light and his colleagues compared crime rates between illegal migrants, legal migrants and native-born US citizens. Upending all anti-immigrant populist “common sense”, their findings showed that illegal immigrants turned out to have the lowest crime rates, legal migrants were represented somewhere in the middle and native-born citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for a violent crime compared to undocumented migrants, four times as likely to be arrested for property felony, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug offences. Across the spectrum of criminality, including homicide, assault, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, theft and arson – undocumented migrants had consistently lower crime rates than native-born citizens. For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, convictions among illegal immigrants were 50 per cent below those of native-born Americans.[8]
Integration
So far, the case is indisputable. Immigrants tend to be less criminal. However much of the ballast from anti-immigration opinion comes from the experiences of second and third generation immigrant demographics both in terms of their relationship to crime and wider issues of societal participation and integration. It is on this terrain that the most bitter culture wars on migration tend to be fought.
The longer migrant groups stay in their adopted country, the more their crime patterns start to resemble those of the native populations due to what sociologists Nin Zhou and Alejandro Portes term ‘downward assimilation’. Zhou and Portes distinguish between three predominant patterns of what they describe ‘segmented assimilation’. In this paradigm, the real issue is not whether children of immigrants assimilate (or integrate) but to which segment and culture formation of society they will assimilate.[9]
Zhou and Portes delineate three immigrant trajectories. The first is that of the children of skilled migrants – they often outperform native-born children at school and go on to achieve professional success. The second is the one of children of lower-educated migrant workers, who can tap into close family and supportive community networks (often in ethnic enclaves) to enable them to navigate their way through education, work and entrepreneurship, ultimately securing their membership of the middle class. The third and more problematic trajectory is the pathway experienced by the children of lower-skilled migrant workers but who fail to grow into the ‘mainstream’ middle class. This is due to an amalgam of discrimination, poverty, segregation and weak community structures which can militate against social mobility and often perpetuate disadvantage. Experiences of racism and exclusion can foster the development of adversarial, dysfunctional, ‘gang’ cultures in socially deprived banlieue type housing projects to which this demographic can be drawn into with attendant routes into crime careers and/or religious or cultural fundamentalism.[10]
Research conducted by Portes and his colleagues among second-generation youths in Southern California and South Florida, highlighted that, in addition to phenomena such as high school dropout rates and early pregnancy, higher rates of arrest and incarceration are indicators of downward assimilation. The research found that second-generation Mexican and Caribbean youth were more likely to end up in prison. By contrast, higher parental education and stronger community cohesion appeared to account for the lower imprisonment rates among Chinese, Korean, Filipino American and Cuban American youth.[11]
However, the major explanatory and structural factor in the downward trajectory of this subset of migrant children is not some immutable characteristic of race, ethnicity or culture but class. In general, crime rates are highest among men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five with low levels of education and earning low wages with long-term unemployment and family dysfunction further strong predictors of criminal behaviour. Criminal reputations and stereotypes of certain marginalised migrant groups tend to diminish with upward mobility into middle class security and acceptance as happened with earlier working-class migrant demographics with criminal reputations such as the Irish and Italians in the US.[12]
Racial Profiling
A major determinant of whether migrants are over-represented in crime statistics and appear in popular prejudices articulated by the Trumps and Farages around migrants bringing crime to their host countries is racial profiling. Minority and migrant groups have a higher chance of being arrested and sentenced, creating a recurring syndrome: as people of colour are more likely to be suspected, arrested and sentenced, the resultant media attention reinforces hostility and prejudices against minorities, particularly young males, leading to repeated arrest, conviction and higher rates of incarceration for offences like those relating to controlled drugs and shoplifting and the creation of racialised stereotypes such as ‘gang violence’ in relation to black-on-black violence or ‘terror attacks’ in the case of mass casualty vehicular attacks of public thoroughfares while white perpetrators are classified as ‘mentally ill’. The movie industry then perpetuates such negative framing by, for example, casting Albanians and other East European men as human traffickers; Arab or Muslim people as ‘terrorists’ and actors of African origin in ‘gangsta’ films.[13]
A particularly egregious public example of racial stereotyping was the rape and murder of 16-year-old Marianne Vaastra who hailed from a small village in the Netherlands province of Friesland on the night of 30th April 1999. The coroner in noting that Marianne had had her throat cut commented that cutting a victim’s throat was not a typically ‘Dutch mode’ of killing. This comment led to a wave of violent threats towards and attacks on refugees in the region and instinctive blame on the local asylum seeker centre. This hostile climate became national when the late far-right Dutch Freedom Party leader Pim Fortyn opined that ‘slitting a throat, that’s not something a Frisian man would do’ and a TV crime show aired images during prime time of ‘Middle Eastern’ men as the likely suspects. These suspicions persisted until a new DNA investigation in 2012 provided definitive proof that the murderer was a local farmer who lived two miles from the scene - to the shock and horror of the local community.[14]
Such examples of racial profiling are not merely anecdotal. The hard data now exists proving its reality. In 2022, Dutch sociologists Willemijn Bezemer and Arjen Leerkes published a study comparing the probability of being registered as a crime suspect among migrant and non-migrant youth with similar levels of self-reported criminal behaviour. In the Netherlands, youths from Moroccan or Caribbean heritage are six to seven times more likely to have been suspected of criminal behaviour than those of native origin. Among youth with Surinamese or Turkish background, crime suspicion rates are four times higher. But this is only part of the story as we have seen earlier. For Bezemer and Leerkes estimated that 46 per cent of this over-representation could not be explained by factors such as criminal behaviour, socioeconomic standing and other individual and neighbourhood features. In comparison with groups with similar criminal profiles, those with secondary vocational education were four to five times more likely to be crime-suspected compared to similarly criminal youngsters in high-level pre-university education. The conclusion is that higher educated mostly white youths have greater success in avoiding trouble with law enforcement agencies than BME and migrant youths who are also likely to experience harsher treatment in the criminal justice systems.[15]
Adverse experiences of ethnic minority and migrant communities of law enforcement agencies do not stop there. Fear and distrust of the police may prevent non-white victims of crime from accessing legal protection, especially in the case of undocumented status migrants who may fear deportation should they report crime to the police. Minority victims of domestic or ‘honour’ based violence may find it more difficult to navigate complex justice system bureaucracy than middle class clients and may experience received cultural prejudices about certain minority groups. And racist prejudice also means that racial minorities are more likely to be the target of police violence as exemplified, most notoriously but hardly uniquely by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May 2020 which generated the global Black Lives Matter movement.[16]
In the last week, Reuters has reported that Donald Trump is considering removing the visas of 240,000 Ukrainian refugees in the US presumably as another coercive measure to force President Zelenskyy to make a dictated peace with his indicted war criminal Russian adversary Vladimir Putin. Leading figures in the British Conservative Party have vocally indicated their willingness to ignore human rights jurisprudence when deliberating on immigration should they return to power. The Daily Mail and Express and X commenters keep railing about ‘small boat’ invasions across the English Channel even though former PM Rishi Sunak regrets his government’s use and deployment of that term. The current Labour Government’s Home Office has quietly introduced changes to the qualifying criteria for indefinite leave to remain which could see refugees without settled pathways to this status being forced to return to Ukraine, Syria and whatever other country of origin is deemed ‘safe’. It is more imperative than ever to proclaim the message Migrant Lives Matter.
Ever since Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 when he loudly proclaimed the incompatibility of New Commonwealth immigrants (those from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent ) with England and the English culture), debates on immigration where the focus becomes one the subjects of crime, integration and (since 9/11 especially) or terrorism have been particularly toxic. This is because they touch on and are exploited by protagonists such as Trump and Reform UK on sensitive matters of culture and identity which liberal democracies are often ill equipped to deal with and resolve. Figures are tossed around willy-nilly and events such as the “grooming gangs” cases of child sexual exploitation involving predominantly males of South Asian heritage and recently lone attacks by migrants/asylum seekers on German civilians are exploited by bad actors on the far right of politics to create hatred and violent disorder. In such climates rational discussion and evidence-based policies can appear well-nigh impossible. I hope that this article can enable both.
The most common source of concern about immigration and crime relates to the apparent overrepresentation of some immigrant and minority groups in criminal activities. Particularly in the US, illegal immigrants are often seen as a crime liability, because their underground, marginal lifestyles supposedly push them into crime to survive. In Europe, alongside fears that some migrant-origin Muslim minorities are terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, exist concerns that misguided and racially prejudiced about ‘loose Western women’ among young Muslims award them a ‘moral licence’ to provoke, harass or sexually assault non-Muslim women in the street. [1] This narrative has taken on an especially potent form in the UK in the case of the afore-mentioned “grooming gangs” controversy.
To take some of the heat and emotion of debates around crime and immigration links, we must turn to the expertise of Hein de Haas. In his path-breaking and magisterial study of migration patterns, he in Myth 12, tackles head on the contention that immigration sends crime rates soaring. He starts out by issuing a health warning about the other variables that affect crime rates and thus the relationship between immigration and crime – such as unemployment, income and education, as well as social control, cohesion and trust in communities. So, when immigrants settle in urban neighbourhoods with preexisting higher crime rates, correlations between immigration and crime become spurious. And as young men commit most crimes, an over-representation of migrants in crime statistics may just reflect the fact that many migrants are young men.[2] Yet this reality may reinforce the nativist fears about the presence of young single foreign men that are voiced any time in any community where it is proposed to temporarily house recently arrived migrants pending decision on their status.
Immigration and Crime
To disprove the false connection so often made by malevolent figures such as Trump and Farage between immigration and rising crime, De Haas marshals high-quality studies by sociologists and criminologists on the relation between changes in immigration rates and changes in crime rates in the same geographical units (say neighbourhoods, municipalities, states or countries) over time. The best research on this topic has been performed in the US. There, most studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the native-born, despite their lower levels of educational attainment and lower wages. If immigrants become involved in crime, it is non-violent crime such as crime and burglary – particularly among unemployed and poor immigrants – and they are substantially under-represented in violent crimes such as aggravated assault, rape and murder. One study found that, among men between 18 and 39 years of age, rates of imprisonment among the foreign-born were one-quarter of the native-born.[3]
Contrary to the Trump uber-slander, Harvard University criminologist Robert Simpson found that Mexican Americans living in Chicago neighbourhoods were 45 per cent less likely to commit violence than third-generation native-born Americans. He attributes this undermining of the ‘criminal alien stereotype’ to the positive effect immigration has on the ability of neighbourhood communities to organise social control based on shared values. Likewise, this crime reducing effect of immigration is a an explanatory factor in why crime rates in cities such as Los Angeles, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix dropped in times of high immigration; and why places of intense immigration; like New York and cities on the Mexican border, such as El Paso and San Diego, are actually some of the safest cities in the US.[4]
In comparison to the United States, evidence is patchier, but where it is available it delivers an equally rebuff to the notion that immigration increases violent crime. One major analysis of national-level data from twenty-one European countries found no relationship between immigration levels and the incidence of rape, sexual assault and homicide. Another analysis of trends of immigration and crime across England between 1971 and 2002 concluded that, as has been found in the US, neighbourhoods actually tend to become safer as more immigrants arrive. It found that crime is appreciably lower in ethnic enclaves where immigrants make up at least 20 to 30 per cent of the population with this crime-reducing effect found to be particularly large in ethnic enclaves with concentrations of the same ethnic background, presumably due to the social control and security that such communities can afford, thereby refuting the ‘ghetto’ stereotype of such enclaves.[5]
Thus, it is fairly easy to logically refute claims that immigration leads to steep spikes in crime rates. For immigrants typically have lower crime rates as immigrants, likely as they are to come from a segment of rather ‘exceptional people’ with particular attitudes and mindsets that make for predispositions towards aspiration and determination to succeed rather than criminality. Because of the logistics involved in migration in terms of cost, risk, planning and willpower; migrants are most unlikely to risk newly and expensively acquired residency and citizenship status through involvement in crime. Contrary to the ‘social disorganisation’ and delinquency theories about immigration of foreign workers from Catholic countries such as Ireland and Italy promulgated by US sociologists in the early 20th century, migrant workers typically cone from socially conservative, community-oriented and religious backgrounds, and are imbued with traditional values of solidarity, respect and a work ethic.[6]
“The Illegals”
Almost counter-intuitively (in the minds of the Trumpians and Faragistes maybe), the above determinants apply even more to a particularly demonised category of migrant – the ‘illegal immigrant’. Because permanent residency or citizenship is an even more prized objective for the ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’, the incentive to stay out of trouble is all the greater as any contact with the police leading to arrest risks deportation and the loss of all resources that went into their migration journeys. Therefore it is not surprising that the massive increase in immigrant detention and deportation by the US federal government has had no appreciable effect on crime rates (not that we can expect that such evidence will lead to any rethink of Donald Trump’s “largest ever deportation programme in the history of the United States”). Several studies by the sociologist Michael Light, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, disprove comprehensively the popular association between illegal migration and rising crime levels. One study analysing data from across all US states between 1990 and 2014 found that the size of the undocumented migrant population in a state does not increase crime and postulated a possible slight crime-reducing effect.[7]
Using individual data on arrests from the Texas Department of Public Safety between 2012 and 2018, Light and his colleagues compared crime rates between illegal migrants, legal migrants and native-born US citizens. Upending all anti-immigrant populist “common sense”, their findings showed that illegal immigrants turned out to have the lowest crime rates, legal migrants were represented somewhere in the middle and native-born citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for a violent crime compared to undocumented migrants, four times as likely to be arrested for property felony, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug offences. Across the spectrum of criminality, including homicide, assault, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, theft and arson – undocumented migrants had consistently lower crime rates than native-born citizens. For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, convictions among illegal immigrants were 50 per cent below those of native-born Americans.[8]
Integration
So far, the case is indisputable. Immigrants tend to be less criminal. However much of the ballast from anti-immigration opinion comes from the experiences of second and third generation immigrant demographics both in terms of their relationship to crime and wider issues of societal participation and integration. It is on this terrain that the most bitter culture wars on migration tend to be fought.
The longer migrant groups stay in their adopted country, the more their crime patterns start to resemble those of the native populations due to what sociologists Nin Zhou and Alejandro Portes term ‘downward assimilation’. Zhou and Portes distinguish between three predominant patterns of what they describe ‘segmented assimilation’. In this paradigm, the real issue is not whether children of immigrants assimilate (or integrate) but to which segment and culture formation of society they will assimilate.[9]
Zhou and Portes delineate three immigrant trajectories. The first is that of the children of skilled migrants – they often outperform native-born children at school and go on to achieve professional success. The second is the one of children of lower-educated migrant workers, who can tap into close family and supportive community networks (often in ethnic enclaves) to enable them to navigate their way through education, work and entrepreneurship, ultimately securing their membership of the middle class. The third and more problematic trajectory is the pathway experienced by the children of lower-skilled migrant workers but who fail to grow into the ‘mainstream’ middle class. This is due to an amalgam of discrimination, poverty, segregation and weak community structures which can militate against social mobility and often perpetuate disadvantage. Experiences of racism and exclusion can foster the development of adversarial, dysfunctional, ‘gang’ cultures in socially deprived banlieue type housing projects to which this demographic can be drawn into with attendant routes into crime careers and/or religious or cultural fundamentalism.[10]
Research conducted by Portes and his colleagues among second-generation youths in Southern California and South Florida, highlighted that, in addition to phenomena such as high school dropout rates and early pregnancy, higher rates of arrest and incarceration are indicators of downward assimilation. The research found that second-generation Mexican and Caribbean youth were more likely to end up in prison. By contrast, higher parental education and stronger community cohesion appeared to account for the lower imprisonment rates among Chinese, Korean, Filipino American and Cuban American youth.[11]
However, the major explanatory and structural factor in the downward trajectory of this subset of migrant children is not some immutable characteristic of race, ethnicity or culture but class. In general, crime rates are highest among men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five with low levels of education and earning low wages with long-term unemployment and family dysfunction further strong predictors of criminal behaviour. Criminal reputations and stereotypes of certain marginalised migrant groups tend to diminish with upward mobility into middle class security and acceptance as happened with earlier working-class migrant demographics with criminal reputations such as the Irish and Italians in the US.[12]
Racial Profiling
A major determinant of whether migrants are over-represented in crime statistics and appear in popular prejudices articulated by the Trumps and Farages around migrants bringing crime to their host countries is racial profiling. Minority and migrant groups have a higher chance of being arrested and sentenced, creating a recurring syndrome: as people of colour are more likely to be suspected, arrested and sentenced, the resultant media attention reinforces hostility and prejudices against minorities, particularly young males, leading to repeated arrest, conviction and higher rates of incarceration for offences like those relating to controlled drugs and shoplifting and the creation of racialised stereotypes such as ‘gang violence’ in relation to black-on-black violence or ‘terror attacks’ in the case of mass casualty vehicular attacks of public thoroughfares while white perpetrators are classified as ‘mentally ill’. The movie industry then perpetuates such negative framing by, for example, casting Albanians and other East European men as human traffickers; Arab or Muslim people as ‘terrorists’ and actors of African origin in ‘gangsta’ films.[13]
A particularly egregious public example of racial stereotyping was the rape and murder of 16-year-old Marianne Vaastra who hailed from a small village in the Netherlands province of Friesland on the night of 30th April 1999. The coroner in noting that Marianne had had her throat cut commented that cutting a victim’s throat was not a typically ‘Dutch mode’ of killing. This comment led to a wave of violent threats towards and attacks on refugees in the region and instinctive blame on the local asylum seeker centre. This hostile climate became national when the late far-right Dutch Freedom Party leader Pim Fortyn opined that ‘slitting a throat, that’s not something a Frisian man would do’ and a TV crime show aired images during prime time of ‘Middle Eastern’ men as the likely suspects. These suspicions persisted until a new DNA investigation in 2012 provided definitive proof that the murderer was a local farmer who lived two miles from the scene - to the shock and horror of the local community.[14]
Such examples of racial profiling are not merely anecdotal. The hard data now exists proving its reality. In 2022, Dutch sociologists Willemijn Bezemer and Arjen Leerkes published a study comparing the probability of being registered as a crime suspect among migrant and non-migrant youth with similar levels of self-reported criminal behaviour. In the Netherlands, youths from Moroccan or Caribbean heritage are six to seven times more likely to have been suspected of criminal behaviour than those of native origin. Among youth with Surinamese or Turkish background, crime suspicion rates are four times higher. But this is only part of the story as we have seen earlier. For Bezemer and Leerkes estimated that 46 per cent of this over-representation could not be explained by factors such as criminal behaviour, socioeconomic standing and other individual and neighbourhood features. In comparison with groups with similar criminal profiles, those with secondary vocational education were four to five times more likely to be crime-suspected compared to similarly criminal youngsters in high-level pre-university education. The conclusion is that higher educated mostly white youths have greater success in avoiding trouble with law enforcement agencies than BME and migrant youths who are also likely to experience harsher treatment in the criminal justice systems.[15]
Adverse experiences of ethnic minority and migrant communities of law enforcement agencies do not stop there. Fear and distrust of the police may prevent non-white victims of crime from accessing legal protection, especially in the case of undocumented status migrants who may fear deportation should they report crime to the police. Minority victims of domestic or ‘honour’ based violence may find it more difficult to navigate complex justice system bureaucracy than middle class clients and may experience received cultural prejudices about certain minority groups. And racist prejudice also means that racial minorities are more likely to be the target of police violence as exemplified, most notoriously but hardly uniquely by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May 2020 which generated the global Black Lives Matter movement.[16]
In the last week, Reuters has reported that Donald Trump is considering removing the visas of 240,000 Ukrainian refugees in the US presumably as another coercive measure to force President Zelenskyy to make a dictated peace with his indicted war criminal Russian adversary Vladimir Putin. Leading figures in the British Conservative Party have vocally indicated their willingness to ignore human rights jurisprudence when deliberating on immigration should they return to power. The Daily Mail and Express and X commenters keep railing about ‘small boat’ invasions across the English Channel even though former PM Rishi Sunak regrets his government’s use and deployment of that term. The current Labour Government’s Home Office has quietly introduced changes to the qualifying criteria for indefinite leave to remain which could see refugees without settled pathways to this status being forced to return to Ukraine, Syria and whatever other country of origin is deemed ‘safe’. It is more imperative than ever to proclaim the message Migrant Lives Matter.
References
[1] Hein Hass (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Penguin p.197
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid, p.198
[4] Ibid, p.199
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid, pp.199-200
[7] Ibid, p.200
[8] Ibid, pp. 200-01
[9] Ibid, p.201
[10] Ibid, pp.201-02
[11] Ibid, p.202
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid, pp.203-05
[14] Ibid, p.203
[15] Ibid, pp.205-06
[16] Ibid, p.206
[1] Hein Hass (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Penguin p.197
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid, p.198
[4] Ibid, p.199
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid, pp.199-200
[7] Ibid, p.200
[8] Ibid, pp. 200-01
[9] Ibid, p.201
[10] Ibid, pp.201-02
[11] Ibid, p.202
[12] Ibid
[13] Ibid, pp.203-05
[14] Ibid, p.203
[15] Ibid, pp.205-06
[16] Ibid, p.206
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
1 in 3 ' Joy residents are foreign nationals .
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid , our next door single income Dublin city neighbours worked as a milkman & taxi driver . My brother lives in the same house today ; the male female couples either side comprise - a G P , Dentist , Hospital Doctor , Barrister .
The milk / taxi man today probably still lives with parents & is single . House prices on the road have increased 9 fold ( currency adjusted ) during the past 3 decades . A net weekly wage was designed to pay a monthly mortgage ! The mortgage now costs € 900 per week to service . Build 30 K homes a year , import 150 K people - what happens to housing costs ? From Auckland to Vancouver the answer is the same .
Expand the supply of public and low rental private housing rather than endlessly promote the ideals of property owning democracy is my answer, Red Ron
ReplyDeleteGenuine question Barry - what are people expected to integrate into given our individualistic and hedonistic culture which, in the (southern) Irish a.k.a. Free State case, is compounded by the official repudiation of the Irish revolution?
DeletePublic housing was often a crime ridden disaster #Finglas # Darndale # Ballyfermot # Sheriff St . Once properties were sold , many of the social problems disappeared . The UK needs to build 800 K homes a year , yet supply has never been more than 350 K ( @ it's 1968 peak ) ! Ireland faces the same problem - except per capita , it's twice as bad . Matt Goodwin ( via social media ) explains the facts & figures with disarming clarity .
ReplyDeleteChungus, as I am resident in Britain I tend to look at migration from a British/European/US perspective I don't feel qualified to write about the Irish angles. An article by some one who lives in ROI would be good.
ReplyDeleteSuch questions are generally considered "low status" in Ireland and not to be uttered in polite company. But there are some interesting changes happening here too - there are specific examples I am aware of both north and south where people are sending their children to Irish language schools to avoid mixing with "new Irish" children. They'd never admit it but it's happening.
DeleteBarry - these pieces are so useful because they use data to confront myths. In Ireland many of these myths are pushed by the Herman Kelly school of thought. If people are opposed to immigration because they feel it is harmful, fair enough. There are enough arguments that can be made - I'm thinking of the type of analysis Angela Nagel brings to the table. But any argument driven by hate should fall on deaf ears. Hatred whether nurtured by the far right or the wokerati is toxic.
ReplyDeleteAngela Nagel has written some good pieces. I think the general mistake people are making is discussing the issue of migration in cultural terms. It's a very nasty business. Most on the left also want to avoid the very obvious questions as to the relationship between immigration and our flawed economic model. Sooner or later we're going to pay for it dearly. Migration is a money machine for home owners - in countries like Ireland it's being used to inflate property ("asset") prices by ramping up demand. This isn't a "crisis" - it's the result of deliberate policy. We are potentially in for a very nasty shock.
Delete