How do crime rates compare between recent immigrants, long-term residents, and British-born populations in the UK?
Executive summary
Recent, long-term and British-born populations cannot be cleanly ranked because authoritative UK data do not record crime by immigration duration or consistently by immigration status; the best-available evidence shows that foreign‑born people as a whole have not driven rises in crime and, when demographic differences are accounted for, non‑citizens are not more likely to be incarcerated than British nationals [1] [2] [3].
1. What the headline studies actually show
Macro studies for England and Wales find that overall property crime fell while the foreign‑born share rose, and researchers conclude there is no evidence that rising migration caused crime to decline [1]; historical and academic analyses similarly find little or no robust link between immigration inflows and increases in violent crime at the population level [4] [5].
2. The demographic elephant in the room — age, sex and socio‑economic profile
Much of the apparent difference in offending dissolves once one controls for age, sex and socio‑economic factors: young men commit more offences regardless of birthplace, and non‑citizens in the UK tend to be concentrated among younger age groups — which helps explain raw differences in custody or conviction shares unless adjusted [2] [6].
3. Recent arrivals, asylum seekers and irregular migrants — higher risk groups or data blind‑spots?
Research and official commentators warn that some subgroups — notably younger, less‑educated men and people with irregular status — have higher measured propensities for certain offences in some countries, but UK data cannot reliably separate crimes by recent arrival status or asylum seeker status because the Ministry of Justice and major surveys do not record duration of residence or systematically capture people in communal accommodation [6] [3].
4. Local correlations do not equal causation — selection and area effects
Analysts emphasise that immigrants often settle in deprived areas where crime rates may already be higher, and population churn can produce misleading correlations: an area’s foreign‑born share can rise at the same time as crime increases because UK‑born residents leave, not because migrants caused crime to rise [1] [4].
5. Convictions, prison populations and measurement problems
Available snapshots show that incarceration and conviction rates are broadly similar between foreign and British nationals and that, when age and sex are controlled for, non‑citizens may have lower shares of incarceration than Brits, but these estimates are imperfect because population denominators and survey undercounting of recent arrivals undermine precise comparisons [2] [7].
6. Conflicting narratives, political uses and contested claims
Pressure groups and commentators produce divergent claims — some try to rank migrant groups by alleged criminality or to present asylum cohorts as disproportionately criminal, while fact checks and reporting point to methodological flaws (outdated denominators, omission of recent arrivals, counting tourists) that exaggerate such claims [8] [9] [3].
7. Bottom line and limits of what can be said confidently
The best-bodied scholarship and official analysis for the UK say there is no robust evidence that immigration per se increases crime at the national level; however, there remain plausible and documented exceptions connected to demographic composition, deprivation, and irregular status, and the absence of routine, reliable data on duration of residence and asylum status means definitive, fine‑grained comparisons between recent immigrants, long‑term migrants and British‑born people are not possible with current public data [1] [2] [3].