Is there a link between migration and crime?

Noisy, angry protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers have become a familiar scene across the UK.

The same slogans appear from town-to-town – “protect our community”, “save our women”, “defend our children” – reflecting the same shared assumption. Migrants and asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes, and make areas less safe.

In the political debate, fears about crime have become one of the most powerful channels through which grievances about migration are expressed.

Crimes committed by asylum seekers and migrants in recent years – in particular the high-profile sexual offences of individuals like Hadush Kebatu in Essex and Sadeq Nikzad in Falkirk – have formed an important part of the messaging of Nigel Farage’s high-flying Reform UK.

The narrative around migrants and crime is clear and stoked by friendly algorithms and some of the world’s most powerful people.

And it may partly explain a growing belief among Britons that immigration is out of hand. This year, 71 per cent of those polled by YouGov said levels of immigration had been too high in the last ten years. In March 2022, just 44 per cent of people held this viewpoint.

But there is far less clarity about the evidence underpinning the claim that more migration means more crime. The Ferret’s new De-noiser strand has been digging into the stats.

Crime rates

Central to the arguments linking migration to crime is a perception that the UK is becoming less safe, and that rates of criminality are increasing. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK launched a ‘Britain is lawless’ campaign earlier this year, suggesting crime was “out of control”. 

But how true is this? According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), rates of crime have been falling in most categories over the last decade. There was a similar reduction in Scotland too, with the equivalent data showing a 37 per cent reduction in the number of property and violent crimes since 2008. In Scotland, despite an overall downwards trend, there has been an increase since 2021. 

Recorded crime data in Scotland shows overall crime per 10,000 people has gone down over the last 20 years, from 1,007 crimes in 2004-5 to 545 in 2024-25. The most recent figures show a small increase from a low of 529 in 2021-22.

Within this data, we can see recent increases in certain types of crime. There has been an increase in sexual crimes in Scotland since 2015-16, as well shoplifting and small increases in weapons possession. 

In England and Wales, homicides have reached its lowest level since current police recording practices began in 2003, while knife crime was reduced by five per cent between 2023-24 and 2024-25. Thirty per cent of knife-related offences in England and Wales take place in the London area.

A problem of data

So what do we currently know about crime rates among migrants to the UK? 

“We've got the conviction data and data on the prison population,” says Ben Brindle, a researcher from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory. This can give a sense of the number of serious crimes committed by foreign nationals in the UK. 

According to the most up-to-date figures, foreign nationals received 13 per cent of convictions in England and Wales in 2024, and made up 12 per cent of the prison population in 2024. That's similar to the latest statistics on the share of foreign nationals in England and Wales, which was about 12 per cent in 2024.

In Scotland, the proportion of prisoners who are not UK nationals was nine per cent in 2023-24. According to the 2022 census, 10.2 per cent of the population was born outside the UK. 

But beyond these headline statistics, there’s a lot that we don’t know.

“We don't have good enough data to be able to have a more in-depth and nuanced view of the relationship between foreign nationals and crime,” Brindle explains. 

The difficulty for researchers and policymakers is that there are numerous factors which impact crime rates, and these have to be unpicked too within the data. 

“These breakdowns don't account for age, and age is really important here”, Brindle says. “Foreign nationals are more likely to be younger, and younger people are more likely to commit crimes.” 

So if non-citizens and citizens of the same age were equally likely to be incarcerated, there would likely be a higher share of non-citizens in prison overall.

When the Migration Observatory factored this in, the data showed foreign nationals are underrepresented in the prison population. 

But despite researchers' requests, the UK Government has not released similar age breakdowns for convictions themselves. 

Another hurdle is the reliability of some of the existing data. It’s likely that there will be differences in the rates of criminal convictions and incarceration by nationality. But there are currently no dependable, up-to-date estimates of the number of people from each nationality living in the UK.  Estimates from the 2024 Annual Population Survey are the most recent available, but these figures may be an underestimate. 

This is due to response rates on surveys being lower among recent arrivals, and the ONS not interviewing people living in communal establishments, such as asylum hotels, student halls, and prisons, where a lot of new arrivals are currently placed. Why is this an issue? 

Brindle says: “It's quite likely that those population figures are going to undercount the population by nationality, which is then going to overstate that nationality's crime rate or conviction or incarceration rate”.

What does the academic evidence say?

Large-scale studies looking at crime rates across different countries have not found a firm connection between increased migration and higher rates of illegal activity. 

In 2022, a peer-reviewed study looked at the offence rate for various types of crime in 30 countries, across 30 years. It found that “no statistical evidence exists to relate an increase in the number of immigrants to the rise of any kind of crime”. 

A widely-cited research project published in 2013 looked at crime patterns in England and Wales, and found a possible causal link between the share of asylum seekers in the local population and a rise in property crime. However, it also discovered that property crime reduced in areas where there were more migrants from eastern European EU countries.  

The study’s authors suggested this could be linked to the lack of access to work and benefits for asylum seekers, compared to the opportunities afforded to economic migrants from the EU, who were freely able to come to the UK before Brexit. 

In the academic analysis overall, Brindle says, researchers “tend to find that there's no relationship between the share of migrants in an area and violent crime rates”.

There is evidence for migrants being overrepresented in crime data from some countries in Europe. A Swedish study, for example, found those from an immigrant background were overrepresented in convictions for rape. 

Beyond the headlines

For researchers into migration, what is often missing in reporting is the characteristics that might make someone more likely to commit crime, beyond any alleged link to their nationality. 

“We can see this data on nationality,” says Brindle. “But we don't have the data on the other characteristics that are going to influence criminal behavior. 

“What we'd want to do in a perfect world is be able to account for age, sex, and socio-economic status… to then be able to specifically pinpoint the role that nationality could be playing”. 

“Somebody's nationality is not the only factor that's going to affect the likelihood that they commit a crime. It's also going to depend on their age, their sex, their socio-economic status, and we haven't got a lot of these things in data to be able to actually work out what is driving criminal behavior”.

Many asylum seekers, for example, tend to be younger men, which is a demographic that is more likely to commit crimes, so researchers can expect there might be more crimes among those seeking asylum than in wider society, because young men are overrepresented.

Perception vs reality

We lack data, and the majority of the evidence we do have doesn’t show a clear link between migration and crime. 

But the link between migration and crime in the eyes of many people is long-held and hard to shift.

Professors Paolo Pinotti, from Bocconi University in Italy, and Olivier Marie, at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, produced a recent long-term study of the connection between immigration and crime. 

Their paper analysed 15 years of data on immigration inflows and crime rates across 216 regions in 23 European countries, and found “no significant link between immigration levels and crime rates”. 

Writing in The Conversation, the pair blamed media and political rhetoric for the enduring connection in the public consciousness. And this is not unique to the UK or even the US. 

They cited a study from Chile, where a boom in the foreign-born population in the early 2000s led to a spike in public concern around crime and safety. Researchers found that “intense media coverage played a significant role in shaping and amplifying public misperception”.

In the UK, surveys have shown that people perceive the most negative impact of immigration is crime. A National Centre for Social Research poll in 2024 found about a third of people think the UK’s crime problems are worsened by people coming to live here from other countries. 

For Brindle though, it comes back to the evidence gap. “I think [better data] is the main thing to inform that debate, because… this debate is going to carry on, it's just whether we do it with statistics to inform us or not.”