Swedish/European 'dopers...immigration and increased crime?

Great Debates
1

I’m going to link to this YouTube video for anyone who is interested in where this is coming from. I got this from a (conservative) friend of mine, so the source is definitely oriented that way. I also follow PragerU though as a channel, and while I often disagree with what they are saying it’s a different perspective. What I don’t really want to see is a bunch of effort to debunk the messenger or the source. What I’d like is for people to dig in on the subject.

For those of you uninterested in watching the video, it’s about Sweden and immigration and an association with increased crime, specifically rape, though they talk about other types of crime. My question to Swedish 'dopers or European 'dopers, what’s the reality here? I mean, I often see stuff like this about the US, but in general, it’s overblown or has to do with very specific areas in some US cities, so my knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss a lot of this along the same lines. Watching some of these videos you get the impression that there are gun fights in the streets of US cities daily and that it affects everyone all the time.

I know that in the past there have been threads talking about increased rape due to immigration into Europe but my impression was, again, that it’s being overblown. But what I’d like to see in this thread is a good faith effort to debate the subject with cites showing either that it IS overblown, that the crime rate due to immigration hasn’t really gone up substantially or the opposite. Anecdotes are also welcome in this case as I’m curious about the impression of Swedish 'dopers to all of this, or European 'dopers in general. I’ve never actually been to Sweden, personally, so have zero first-hand knowledge of the country, so would value 'dopers takes on this.

2

"To isolate the effect of immigration on crime, we need data on crimes committed by immigrants. Obtaining this type of data is easy in the United States or Denmark, but not in Sweden. The last time there was an official report breaking down crime statistics by immigrant status and origin was in 2005, for the years 1997 to 2001. These statistics confirmed that immigrants were significantly overrepresented amongst offenders, in particular in committing violent crimes. The foreign born were four times more likely to be suspects in homicide cases than those with Swedish origin, and 4.5 times more likely to be suspects in rape cases.

Since then, Swedish criminologists and politicians have made sure that no new statistics have been released. Not a single recent research study in Sweden has attempted to estimate the causal effect of immigration on sexual assault or homicide rates. Parliament recently defeated a motion to produce up-to-date crime statistics based on national origin. We simply do not know what percentage of sexual assaults or homicides were committed by immigrants last year in Sweden. The Swedish criminologists and government officials who adamantly deny the effect of immigration on crime don’t know these figures, and strikingly don’t want to know. Americans who are interested in this topic should focus on this surreal taboo against statistics, not cartoonish exaggerations that falsely portray Sweden as a war zone."

3

I read a long article in Finland’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat last week that took a look at the sexual assault cases by immigrants and it said that immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan were far more likely to commit such crimes than us Finns. Partly because the refugees are mostly young men but the numbers were high even when adjusted for that. Because of their fairly low numbers here there’s no huge sexual assault crime wave going on though.

No idea on violent crime but I can’t remember any recent cases in media, I’m sure there’d be more noise about it if there were a lot of cases. Some fights and racist neo-nazi Finns throwing molotov’s cocktails at refugee centers and crap like that yes. As a male I’d be more scared of a bunch of shaved head white guys in leather jackets and combat boots than of a bunch of refugees.

Mostly it’s pretty peaceful here. It’s just when something happens it makes the news easily.

4

Depends on the country in question and the source of immigrants in question.

One case that does stand out as being egregiously bad is south Asians in Britain. As of 2011, UK crime statistics indicated that out of statutory rape cases where the race of the offender was known, 38% were South Asian and 53% were “white British”. Since south Asians were only 5% of the overall population that works out to an 11- to 12-fold higher rate of statutory rape offenses.

5

Austria has had a lot of chatter in their media about some recent rape events committed by Middle Eastern immigrants but I’d have to look up the actual numbers before I can tell you if there’s actually a statistically valid phenomenon. Nobody knows about the situation in Sweden since they don’t publicly release crime statistics by ethnic origin.

6

The general impression in Norway is that things are going south over there. And the debate seems utterly lacking.

They are however, going south from a Scandinavian starting point, and Sweden is still on the low-crime side of average when compared to the world in general.

There are some good crime versus nation of origin stats in Norway May need Google translate. Figure 2 shows the percentage of people from a nation that were convicted of a crime at least once in the 3-year perod between 2005-2008.

As you can see, some nations are massively overrepresented.

Figure 3 adjusts for age, sex, location and employment.

The numbers are probably less applicable to Swedens situation than you’d expect though.

7

What would be the point of analysing statistics in this way anyway? From a US point of view, would you say retrospectively that you shouldn’t have had more or less open immigration from Ireland and Italy because of their historical association with successive waves of criminality?

8

I’m sure some people made exactly that argument at the time. More importantly though, the United States has a ton of problems, it’s not (in my view) the Platonic ideal of a good society, and there’s no reason that European countries should make the same decisions that we did. I don’t think stringent immigration policies are right for the US, but I do think they’re the best thing for most of Europe.

I would still have problems with mass migration into most European countries even if it turned out that all of the ethnic minority communities were perfectly law abiding: my major concerns here about European countries preserving their ethnic and cultural identities, not about crime. In some situations though, such as with South Asians in Britain, there are practical reasons for concern as well.

9

Danish doper here, with friends and acquaintances who either live in or frequent Sweden. Studies are hard to come by, but I can provide you what little (and unreliable) anecdotal information I have.

Immigrants are overrepresented in terms of criminality. That much is pretty much stone-cold, uncontestable fact. The reasons for this, however, have very little (in my experience, anyway, although there definitely are some issues with regards to cultural attitudes to women, but those are primarily a first-generation immigrant problem) to do with nebulous cultural factors, and more to do with generational poverty.

Most of our immigrants or citizens of proximate immigrant descent either are unskilled workers themselves, or have parents who were unskilled workers. This leads to poor educational outcomes, relative poverty, and crime. The recent wave of migrants and refugees has not really been felt here on a large scale, among other things because of an effort by hard-liners in the current government to effectively segregate them from the rest of the population. How said wave of migrants has affected Sweden, I am not certain of, but my impression is that its effects on the day-to-day lives of the average Swede are wildly overstated.

With regards to the consistently (and quite frankly it’s so idiotically misunderstood by US conservatives, our own home-grown racists, etc that I’m starting to find it tiresome) cited Swedish rape statistics, rape statistics are not created equally. Sweden, to put it simplistically, reports a far greater variety of crimes under the heading “rape” than is protocol in the US. To take it directly from the source, the Swedish government states the following:

You can find more writings on the state of migrants etc relative to crime, rape statistics, et al, compiled by the Swedish government officially, here: http://www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migration-and-crime-in-sweden/

10

Numbers from Finland and Norway:

Immigrant crime in Norway and Finland

Certain countries are overrepresented even when corrected for demographics (number of young men). But I wouldn’t say “greatly” overrepresented. Slightly overrepresented; albeit statistically significant. And small numbers overall.

Former Yugoslavia is one of the overrepresented countries.

“Wars or other traumatic crises” in the home countries is speculated to be a contributing factor.

11

A 3-hour drama on this is beginning tonight on the BBC so it’ll be interesting to see what themes that picks out.

What I know is these mostly young men came to the UK not only from very rural villages in Pakistan - like the tribal area known to US drones, etc - but also medieval times, maybe circa the 1500s. They literally have no idea of females except mothers and sisters - their only sexual reference point was pornhub-dot-com

I also understand in some areas of the UK local authorities were reluctant to accept there was a problem for fear of accusations of racism - they simply had no idea what to do and so ignored the please for help.

I will find it very difficult to watch the BBC drama because, like very many, I was and am so angry at what happened. The Pakistan community had to deal with this otherwise they were facing an horrendous, violent backlash. As well as the abuse, the girls were abandoned by social services and the police, and that has now been - everyone hopes - rectified.

The girls may never recover. Men have gone to prison. It was an awful period.

12

Not so retrospective; the USA continues to celebrate Italian immigrant criminality in film and tv.

Somewhat ironic the ethnic group most associated with criminality in the USA today is the one group who’s ancestors had to be kidnapped in Africa in order to make the journey.

13

As always, it’s worth remembering the three important words “compared to what?”

It APPEARS that immigration HAS led to an increase in crime in many countries, including Sweden. On the other hand, crime in Sweden is still quite low compared to most major cities in the USA.

So, the question isn’t just “Has immigration led to increased crime” but “How much crime, how serious the crime, is it gradually getting better or worse, and does that outweigh either our moral obligation to help refugees or whatever benefits we think immigration brings?”

But of course, that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

14

This is just my own personal perception; I know many people who agree, but also many who wouldn’t. ISTM as if often the first people to come from another country are likely to commit a certain amount of errors, which will be mainly a function of the differences between their culture of origin and that where they’ve moved. As an immigrant, you can find yourself surprised by the stupidest little things (such as traffic lights), but also things which “back home” are acceptable or even common turn out to be frowned upon or illegal in the new country (such as turning right on a red light - in Europe, don’t do it; in most if not all American countries, remember cars can do it).

But then you start getting “second wave” immigrants, who maybe arrive having the address of people from the old country, or maybe they meet someone who says “oh, I know someone from your country, let me introduce you” (happened to me several times in multiple locations). And that someone who’s been there for a while can help you avoid the hidden mines.

So, and again my own impression, there’s like two types of… malfeasance associated with immigration. On one hand there’s the people who would be turds in any country (organized crime, jerks); on the other there’s people doing things wrong because they just don’t know that this way is not the way it’s done here. And this second type happens a lot whenever there is a new type/origin of immigrant, but goes down as time progresses. This lowering of unintended mistakes is part of what we call “integration”.

15

I guess I’ll be the Swedish person here. Let’s clear up a misconception.

It’s true that official statistics don’t mention ethnicity, but it does deal with citizenship. A person with Swedish citizenship will be lumped in with ethnic Swedish people, even if both his parents came from Morocco. I’m not going to dig up statistics for non citizens, because dredging through the databases will take more time than it’s worth. If a foreign national is committed for a crime he (it’s almost always a he) will serve his jail sentence and then be deported for life.

Now then, are immigrants overrepresented in crime statistics. Yes. To the extent of about 2.5 more likely to commit a violent crime, as compared to native born people. That factor has been the same since the 70’s no matter where the immigrants during a certain period came from*.

But the thing about immigrants, no matter if they just immigrate or are refugees, is that they tend to end up being the underclass in the new country. And the underclass is overrepresented when it comes to violent crime. So the same statistic that note that immigrants are about 2.5 more likely to commit a violent crime, also says that people on welfare, regardless of ethnicity, are 6 times more likely to commit a violent crime. I don’t think we can blame welfare for crime rate, so let’s not use ethnicity to do the same.

Huh, who’d have thought poverty begets crime?

Also, murder statistics put the number at roughly 100 per year for a population of 10M. Some years it’s up 10-20 people, some years it’s down by the same numbers. All in all, violent crime is not very common and the immigrants committing them tend to inflict the violence among themselves.

*70’s where a lot of Chilean followed by boat refugees and Iranians around 1980. Mid to late 80’s saw a lot of people from what was still Yugoslavia. Iraqis started showing up after Gulf I, with more people from the Balkans and Somalia during the mid 90’s. Afghanis started showing up too, fleeing Taliban rule. Early aughts gave us more Iraqi, Afghanis, Somalian and Eritrean refugees. Since 2011, there’s been a steady stream of Syrian culminating during the fall of '15.

16

I have certainly seen a steadily increasing number of offenders at the highest levels of offending from immigrants

Spousal violence and drunk implicated murders seem to be more common among the northern eastern Europeans - Poland, Balts.

As for drugs and sexual offences, there are a lot of Pakistani Asians but it seems less common among Indian Asians.

Is this greater than the indigenous population? I suspect its a question no-one in the UK wants to ask, and I doubt that ethnicity of offenders is not gathered in a uniform manner.

One thing I do see regularly is that Eastern European serious offenders frequently have a history of serious offending in their own countries - and that it should not be too difficult to implement checks on them when they enter the UK, except that even if we did, we still have to let them in, it takes a heck of lot of things to line up correctly before we can ban them, and its one of the reasons why I voted to leave the EU, I see it often enough to influence my vote.

17

The ordinary population probably (and certainly the media) doesn’t want to ask the question, but the UK government does indieed collect statistics on ethnicity of offenders. Here’s the numbers on statutory rape of minors, from the UK government (the link is through a liberal Pakistani newspaper).
"Whilst these particular trials dealt with Pakistani perpetrators and white victims, it is both inappropriate and incorrect to extrapolate from it the conclusion that all sexual offences of this type are committed by Pakistani men. For example, through the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the government concluded after investigation that of known suspects since 2008:

38% were white

32% recorded as an unknown ethnicity

26% were Asian

3% were African American

less than 1% Chinese."

As I noted above, since the Uk population is 5% British Asian as of 2011, that works out to an 11-12 fold higher rate of statutory rape.

I’ll take your word for it that this is less of a problem with Indians in Britain than Pakistanis, but I don’t think this is an effect of Indian culture being ‘better’ as regards women. North India famously has horrible problems regarding the treatment of women. It’s probably because Indian immigrants to the UK represent a narrower, more highly ‘selected’ and educated slice of the population than the Pakistani immigrants (a huge slice of whom were former peasants from the Punjab-Kashmir border areas whose homeland was flooded out by construction of a dam).

As far as Eastern Europeans go, it’s interesting that (unlike, say, North Africans in France) they have comparatively high murder rates in their home countries as well. The Baltic states, along with Russia and IIRC Belarus, are among the few European countries to have higher murder rates than the US.