Foreigners Three Times as Likely to be Arrested for Sex Offences as British Citizens

Foreign nationals are 3.5 times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as British citizens, according to the first analysis revealing the scale of crime by migrants. The Telegraph has the story.

Police made more than 9,000 arrests of foreign nationals for sexual offences in the first 10 months of last year in 41 of the 43 forces in England and Wales.

This represented a quarter (26.1%) of the total estimated 35,000 sexual offence arrests, according to the first analysis of its kind by the Centre for Migration Control of data from police forces, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Foreigners were 3.5 times as likely to be arrested for sex offences as British suspects, based on a rate of nearly 165 arrests per 100,000 of the migrant population against 48 per 100,000 for Britons.

For all crimes, foreign nationals were arrested at twice the rate of British natives, accounting for 131,000 of the arrests from January to October 2024.

While foreigners make up 9% of the population, they accounted for 16.1% of the total number of arrests according to the figures, released under freedom of information (FOI) laws.

The crime league table places Albanians as the nationality most likely to be arrested, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Algerians and Somalians. There were 48 nationalities with a higher arrest rate per 1,000 of their populations than British suspects.

The analysis comes amid claims of an “institutional cover-up” over the publication of migrant crime rates. Meanwhile, demands are growing for a public inquiry into sex grooming scandals where the ethnicity of suspects was allegedly suppressed.

Senior Tory MPs have urged both the Conservative and Labour Governments to publish data, as is done in Denmark and some U.S. states, that would enable league tables of the crime rates of nations’ migrants to be compiled.

A backbench amendment to Rishi Sunak’s Sentencing Bill would have required the Government to present a report to Parliament each year detailing the nationality, visa and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts in the previous 12 months, but the Bill was ditched because of the General Election.

Supporters including Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary, who first proposed the legal change, said such data would enable the Home Office to toughen up visa and deportation policies for nationalities linked to higher rates of crime in the U.K.

MPs are expected to put forward similar amendments to immigration and sentencing legislation to be laid before Parliament by Sir Keir Starmer later this year.

Mr Jenrick said: “To establish an immigration and criminal justice system that serves the interests of the British public, policy makers need this information. There is not a single good reason why the Ministry of Justice shouldn’t publish this in full, completely transparently, on a regular basis.”

According to the analysis, foreign nationals were arrested at almost twice the rate of British people in the first 10 months of 2024, with 23.9 arrests per 1000 for migrants compared with 12 per 1000 for Britons. For sex offence arrests, the rate rose to 3.5.

Foreign nationals account for 5.5 million people in Britain, according to the ONS, while the British population is 53.5 million.

The 9,055 foreign national arrests for sex offences works out at a rate of 164.6 per 100,000 of the population, compared with 25,680 arrests of Britons – a rate of 48 per 100,000.

Worth reading in full.

Just one problem with these stats, of course: do we really believe the ONS when it says there are 5.5 million foreign nationals in Britain? As Ed West noted in the Spectator recently, we have no real idea how many people are living in the country: “NHS records found there to be 63 million registered GP patients in England as of September 2024. Yet the population of England was 56 million in the 2021 census, and only 57 million in 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics.” If England’s doctors have six million people on their books that the ONS claims don’t exist (bearing in mind that illegal migrants don’t have to declare their status when registering with GPs), then how many foreign nationals are actually living in Britain? A higher foreign national population would cut the crime rate per 1,000 of that population, but this is hardly reassuring.