Europe Shows a Clear Link Between Immigration and Crime — Like the One the U.S. Seriously Downplays

Violent crime is becoming common in Sweden, shocking residents of the famously placid Scandinavian nation, where horrific acts of violence have become “all too familiar,” according to Common Sense Media, part of a Swedish nonprofit organization.

Since 2018, Swedish authorities have recorded an estimated 500 bombings, while what they describe as gang shootings have become increasingly common. The country reported a record 124 homicides in 2020 and many residents were shocked in April when violent riots injured more than 100 police officers.

But Sweden’s crime spike is not an anomaly in Europe, as homicides have risen during the last decade across the European Union, from Hungary and Germany to Denmark and Finland. An analysis of EU and United Nations crime data by RealClearInvestigations shows that, as in Sweden, the broader crime wave is strongly correlated with immigration.

“The country-level data for EU countries keeps track of immigration data that allows you to look at many different places over time in a way that we simply aren’t able to do looking across U.S. states,” said Carl Moody, an economics professor at William & Mary College who specializes in criminology.

Criminal justice experts say that the precision offered by European data may provide guideposts to the United States as it grapples with a host of pathologies ranging from rising violent crime and mass shootings to social disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic. Europe’s experience suggests one avenue of inquiry for policy makers and criminal justice experts is crime directly tied to immigration and drug-trafficking across the porous U.S.-Mexico border.

Currently, however, crime statistics in the U.S. generally do not allow researchers to make definitive conclusions on how much illegal immigrants may have influenced the rise in violent crime. Because of the political sensitivity of the question, almost no state officials keep track of the immigration status of prisoners in their jails.

Over the 10 years from 2012 to 2021, about 41 million people immigrated to the European Union, and of those about 3.8 million, over 9%, are estimated to have done so illegally. Sweden’s largely legal influx of newcomers averaged nearly 130,000 a year from 2012 to 2019, before the country began curtailing immigration in 2020.

Former Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson has said the country’s growing problems of gangs and violence are due to its failure to integrate foreign-born residents, whose numbers have doubled during the last two decades to about two million people (or almost 20% of the total population). Sweden’s intelligence chief, Linda H. Staaf, told the BBC in 2019 that many of the perpetrators of crime share a similar profile. “They have grown up in Sweden and they are from socio-economically weak groups, socio-economically weak areas, and many are perhaps second- or third-generation immigrants,” she said. —READ MORE HERE

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