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A welcome announcement this week has come in the form of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s concession to begin publishing crime statistics by nationality. It is a positive development that the public may now begin to appreciate the consequences of mass, uncontrolled immigration, including on public safety.
Kudos must be given to Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick and Professor Matt Goodwin for campaigning consistently against the insanity of our immigration policy (or lack thereof) and the absence of data around it; something Migration Watch has long pointed to. The government has never published a full breakdown of crime statistics by nationality, a key lack of transparency in helping the public to understand, and policy planners to take account of, the impact of mass immigration, typically over fears of being seen as “racist”.
But after nearly a year of campaigning, Jenrick has managed to pressure the government into releasing these tables, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pledging to do so. The Home Office has stated that, once it has updated its data collection systems:
“Breakdowns of this data, such as statistics on the type of offences committed by FNOs (foreign national offenders) subject to immigration powers, or their nationalities, will be prepared as ‘experimental statistics’ due to them being derived from a redesigned data system.”
This is a welcome development – but it’s not enough. The public fully deserve to know what the impact of mass immigration is on crime and public safety. We have been pushing for transparency on this issue for a while, with our briefing paper from May last year showing the impact of mass immigration on Britain’s security, connecting the dots between the surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes, terrorism in this country and funding from abroad, and the nationality of those who have been prosecuted.
The government finally conceding the need to publish this data is a positive step, but it is not due to be published until the end of the year, and even then it won’t be anywhere near detailed enough. Jenrick himself described it as a “watered-down” version of his own proposals, saying “this looks like it will not shine the light that we really need on everyone who’s in our country who isn’t a British national and who’s committing crime.”
Alongside this, Sam Ashworth-Hayes in The Telegraph (see the link below) is arguing for the same level of data to be released but in terms of economic contributions and dependency. Britain either does not collect, or does not release, this data, while other European nations do: as Sam writes, Denmark “has calculated that non-Western immigrants and their descendants cost roughly £3bn a year, while Western immigrants and their descendants pay in £1.3bn.” Likewise, in the Netherlands, researchers “have found Western immigrants bring a net benefit of £36,000 each, and non-Western immigrants a drain of £143,000.” Our own research, following on from research carried out by University College London, could only look at two groups of migrants: EEA (European Economic Area) and non-EEA.
There is certainly a need to cut immigration, and we must be informed of the consequences of not doing so, especially for the safety of our citizens. It is welcome that politicians are talking about this more and more, with the idea of a ‘Minister for Deportations’ being floated by Nigel Farage; Farage’s announcement specified that Britain should ensure there is “no more population increase due to net migration”, and that a Reform government would “bring a total end to all asylum claims from people who come here on travel visas or who are overseas students” with more details to follow next month. All of this is greatly encouraging. We look forward to seeing what other thoughts Reform have in their locker.
But it is not sufficient to break down figures just on this basis – we need information and data on the nationality level. This is necessary to help develop a migration policy that helps ensure we receive the individuals we should, and turn away the individuals we don’t have a need for and don’t want.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.