Foreign nationals have been convicted of nearly a quarter of recent sex crimes in Britain, the Telegraph revealed earlier this week.
Data from the Ministry of Justice, obtained by the Centre for Migration Control through a freedom-of-information request, show that 15 per cent of sexual offences were accounted for by foreign nationals between 2021 and 2023. A further eight per cent of convictions were recorded as being committed by ‘unknown nationalities’, which is likely to also be mostly non-Brits. In any case, this means that foreign nationals – who represent around one in 10 people in the wider population – are vastly overrepresented among sex offenders.
When compared with British citizens, Afghans and Eritreans in particular were over 20 times more likely to account for convictions connected to sex crimes. Foreign nationals were also disproportionately convicted for violent crimes, with the top two nationalities being Congolese and Somali. Congolese migrants were nearly 12 times more likely to be convicted of such crimes than British citizens.
These numbers confirm what has been obvious for some time – namely, that the UK’s dysfunctional immigration system and lax border security pose a real danger to the public. In recent years, there has been an industrial-scale importation of young, often unattached males, originating from parts of the world with vastly different social, cultural and legal norms. This has unsurprisingly made Britain less safe, especially for women and girls.
It should come as no shock that the nationalities most strongly associated with sex-crime convictions come from countries where women’s rights are in desperately short supply. Afghanistan has recently passed a series of laws with the aim of virtually erasing women from any kind of public life. In Eritrea, the vast majority of women are forced to undergo female genital mutilation. In substantial sections of these societies, women are viewed merely as possessions of men for service and pleasure. No wonder many immigrants from these cultures carry that view with them to the UK.
It is unsurprising, too, that many of these sex offenders originate from conflict zones. In these regions, women and girls are all too often subjected to gender-based violence and locked into forms of sexual servitude. Elsewhere, like in peaceful but relatively deprived Moldova, which also ranks high on the Telegraph’s list, there remains a serious problem with human trafficking. This manifests especially in the form of sexual exploitation by organised criminal gangs.
The problem is not just that foreign nationals seem to be committing disproportionate amounts of crime. To make matters worse, it feels as though the British state is powerless to stop it. In recent weeks, there have been near daily stories about foreign criminals who are unable to be deported for highly questionable human-rights reasons. Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper did announce last week that new powers would be introduced to track and restrict the movements of foreign criminals in the UK. But this is not enough. They should not be allowed to remain in the UK at all – especially when convicted of sexual offences or violent crimes on British soil.
Post-Brexit, the UK government promised the immigration system would prioritise the ‘brightest and the best’ – that is, people who are net financial contributors. The economics of immigration is obviously hugely important. But cultural and social compatibility matters, too. We have allowed in large numbers of male migrants who belong to unquestionably misogynistic and chauvinistic cultures. We have then subsequently failed to adequately integrate them into a liberal Western democracy. This has made the job of combating violence towards women and girls much more difficult.
Immigration and asylum policy should have public safety at the heart of it – especially the protection of its own citizens from violent and sexual crimes. If that requires the UK to change its relationship with existing international human-rights conventions and refugee treaties, then so be it. The right of British citizens to be safe should matter, too.
Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.
