Democrats for years have been claiming that crime in the U.S. committed by illegal aliens is minuscule compared to that (for the same crimes) in Europe. There’s no doubt that obtaining accurate results for comparison purposes is difficult — especially when accurate numbers for illegal in the U.S. are unknown. Why? Ask President Biden or his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s not that the U.S. cannot “Find” these numbers. Democrats led by the President and Mayorkas don’t care to know. More important is that the President and Mayorkas don’t want the People to know.
Then there’s “Violent Crime.”
Violent Criminality
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. That population is now about two million — 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.
Homicide data for the European Union from the United Nations Office on drugs and crime for 11 years from 2010 to 2020, and compared it to rising percentages of each country’s foreign-born population. Even after accounting for variations among countries, the data show that each one-percentage-point increase in the immigrant population is associated with a 3.6% increase in the homicide rate.
Crime Prevention Research Center
“These results are consistent with other studies in various European countries showing that immigrants — as a group — commit crimes at higher rates than the native-born population,” said Tino Sanadaji of the Institute for Economic and Business History Research in Sweden.
It remains true that the vast majority of foreign-born residents and their children are not engaged in crime, but the evidence shows many of the victims of crime are also newcomers. In some instances, they have been victimized by native-born residents who resent their presence, and criminologists say this backlash should be classified as immigration-related crimes. The violent riots that occurred across Sweden in April, for example, occurred after a Swedish-Danish anti-Islamist and his followers burned the Koran at a rally.
Rising murder rates in Europe are dwarfed by those in the U.S., where cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles record hundreds of homicides yearly. Homicides in the U.S. are also much more highly concentrated in tiny areas than in Europe, with over half of U.S. murders occurring in just 2% of its counties. But Europe has long had much higher violent crime rates than the U.S.
European media reports and government spokespeople are often circumspect about the problem. They repeatedly attribute much of the crime to “Gangs,” the membership rarely spelled out, and “gun violence” among unlabeled perpetrators.
Until recently, Sweden’s crime prevention agency had not offered a comprehensive look at the issue since 2005. In October, however, the Agency acknowledged that Sweden ranks “very high” in homicides when compared with other European nations, with a murder rate of 4 per million as compared to the continent’s 1.6 per million.
In 2020, Swedish Sociology professor Goran Adamson published a crime study showing an unmistakable link to immigration. It concluded that from 2002 to 2017, 58% of criminal suspects in Sweden were immigrants. That figure rose for murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter, where immigrants were identified as suspects in 73% of the cases, and in robberies in which immigrants were suspected in 70%.
Adamson stated that members of some immigrant groups — such as Vietnamese — were less prone to commit crimes than native Swedes. Others — such as those from the Middle East and Africa, where most of the immigrants in Sweden are from — were MORE likely to do so. Overall, Adamson’s study concluded that Sweden’s murder rate had quadrupled due to immigration. Consequently, he found the “official” statistical analysis “believable.”
Researchers in Denmark Reached similar conclusions about immigration and crime. An index shows that crime in 2020 was 51% higher among male immigrants and 149% higher among male offspring with a non-western background than among the entire male population.
In Norway and Finland, too, a higher incidence of crime is also found in immigrant populations, according to recent research. Similar data on the Citizenship status of people arrested or in jail is rarely collected in the U.S. One state where data is collected — Texas — shows that illegal aliens are convicted of homicide 32% more frequently than the rest of the Texas population. The rate of sexual assaults is 91% higher among illegals.
Such findings have percolated through Scandinavian political debates, with candidates on the Right making rising crime a centerpiece of their 2022 campaigns. On the Progressive Left, critics tend to dismiss such statistical studies as “racist.”
Swedish officials have sought to deflect attention from the findings, with the foreign ministry pointing out in September that most immigrants are not criminals. Yet, at the same time, they insisted immigrants were not responsible for surging crime reports. They acknowledged that non-native-born people were suspected of crimes at a rate of 2.5 times higher than native-born Swedes.
Voters have reacted accordingly. Until 2022, the Social Democratic Party had dominated politics in Sweden, ruling for almost a half-century (from 1932 to 1976) and holding power again from 2014 to 2022.
But it was toppled in September when voters elected a right-of-center coalition of the right-wing Sweden Democrats and other right-of-center parties. Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the Moderate Party, was named Prime Minister on October 17.
In his study, Adamson urged Swedes to take a clear-eyed approach to what is happening, arguing that viewing things through a politically sensitive, multicultural lens clouds the picture and undermines policy approaches that could address the problem.
“Social Democratic views of the 1960s are now considered far “right-wing” — a psychological trauma as if straight out of an Ingmar Bergman movie,” Adamson wrote, adding that “Anti-intellectualism has defined Swedish Migration Discourse for decades.”
