German study: Immigration does not raise crime rate

Of note, similar to other countries:

Immigrants or refugees do not have a higher tendency to commit crime and there is no correlation between the proportion of immigrants in a given district and the local crime rate, according to a new analysis of the latest German crime statistics carried out by the renowned ifo institute.

The Munich-based institute correlated the latest national crime stats from 2018 to 2023 with location-specific data in the new study to show why the fact that immigrants are overrepresented in crime statistics had nothing to do with where they came from.

Migrants tend to settle in urban areas, where there is more population density, more nightlife, and more people in public spaces at all hours of the day. That means the general crime rate is higher, and crime suspects are just as likely to be German as of foreign background. In other words, districts with higher levels of “immigrant” crime also have higher crime rates among Germans.

“These places increase the risk of becoming perpetrators for residents, regardless of nationality, due to the infrastructure, economic situation, police presence or population density,” the study said.

The researchers pointed to other reasons why immigrants tend to be overrepresented in crime figures: Immigrants are generally younger and more often male than the German population — but those, according to the researchers, were less important contributing factors.

Studies contradict the populist narrative

The supposed propensity of immigrants to commit crimes has become the dominant narrative in the current German election campaign. In a recent Bundestag debate on restricting immigration, Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), spoke of “daily occurring gang rapes in the asylum seeker milieu.”

Those words echoed the narrative now routinely propagated by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). In early February, the AfD’s Beatrix von Storch told German public broadcaster ARD, “We have two gang rapes a day, we have ten normal rapes a day and we have had 131 violent crimes a day on average over the last six years — by immigrants, primarily Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis.”

“We have skyrocketing crime statistics. We have skyrocketing crime among foreigners, youth crime, migrant violence,” AfD co-leader and chancellor candidate Alice Weidel said in 2024. “Rapes are high, knife crimes are high, 15,000 in the last year.”

The numbers were found to be false by media outlets’ fact-checking teams.

Much-reported attacks by people of immigrant background in Munich, Aschaffenburg, and Magdeburg have fueled this popular narrative, but statistical studies draw a very different picture.

“Even for violent crimes such as homicide or sexual assault, the study shows no statistical correlation with an increasing share of foreigners or refugees,” the ifo researchers said.

Source: German study: Immigration does not raise crime rate