Fact check: What are the most common crimes committed by migrants in the UK since the 2020 Brexit policy?

1. A headline claim: “Brexit made migrant crime worse” — what the evidence actually says

The assertion that Brexit has directly increased crimes by migrants is raised by experts who link changed borders and intelligence gaps to greater opportunity for organised crime, including human and arms trafficking, but this is an inference about organised groups rather than a quantified list of crimes committed by migrants. The commentary from a named academic frames Brexit as a factor in facilitating organised-crime operations, yet it does not provide offender-level breakdowns or comparative pre/post-2020 crime-type tables ^[1]. Official statistical breakdowns needed to confirm the claim are not present in the supplied materials.

2. Government returns and removals data exist — but they don’t list crime types

The Home Office and Migration Observatory briefings cited discuss returns, deportations and voluntary departures of people without a legal right to stay, offering numbers and characteristics of those returned rather than cataloguing crimes they committed while in the UK. These documents therefore illuminate enforcement and removal activity but not which offences were most commonly committed by migrants since 2020, leaving a substantive evidentiary gap when answering the original question directly ^[2].

3. Hate crime statistics increase — victims, not migrant offenders

Recent Home Office data for the year ending March 2025 records a rise in police-recorded hate crimes, including increases in race and religious hate crimes, and an upward trend in transport-related racist incidents reported through British Transport Police (dates: 2025-10-09 and 2025-10-22). These statistics document victimisation patterns and public-order concerns and have been used in political debate, but they do not attribute those offences to migrants as offenders, and therefore cannot be used to infer what crimes migrants most commonly commit ^{[3] [5]}.

4. Political controversy over publishing offender immigration status clouds interpretation

There is active political contention about whether to compel ministers to publish immigration and asylum statuses of offenders; accusations that political actors are withholding such data have featured in parliamentary rows. These disputes highlight both demand for disaggregated offender data and the absence of an agreed, publicly available offender-immigration-status dataset in the supplied material, meaning that headline claims about migrant crime can be amplified politically without firm statistical backing in the documents given ^[4].

5. Organised crime versus migrant individual offending — two different storylines

The supplied analyses draw a distinction between organised criminal enterprises exploiting post-Brexit border and intelligence conditions and individual-level offending statistics. The academic view points to organised groups (e.g., human trafficking networks) becoming more active, whereas official returns and hate-crime data address enforcement and victimisation. This split between collective organised-crime concerns and individual offender attribution is central: the material supports the organised-crime narrative but does not offer offender-status breakdowns for common offences by migrants ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

6. What is missing — the exact data you need to answer the question

To answer “most common crimes committed by migrants since 2020” requires datasets that cross-reference offender nationality or immigration status with offence type and time period. None of the provided items supplies that cross-tabulation: returns data omit crime-type attribution, hate-crime and policing figures focus on victims and offence categories without offender immigration status, and commentary raises issues without supplying quantitative offender breakdowns ^{[2] [3]}.

7. Bottom line for readers and researchers seeking clarity

Based on the supplied materials, it is not possible to produce a defensible list of “most common crimes by migrants” post-2020; available sources point to increased organised-crime concerns and rising hate-crime recordings, and to political disputes over publishing offender immigration-status data, but they do not provide the necessary cross-tabulated offender-level statistics to substantiate the original claim. Policymakers and journalists seeking that answer need targeted datasets from law enforcement or Home Office releases that explicitly link immigration status to recorded offence types and timeframes ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}.