I've found a series of Substack articles by Tomas Pueyo that analyse the question of whether immigrants are more likely to commit crime. The broad answer seems to be yes. Partly because young men immigrate more than others but largely the effect is related to immigration from 'low trust', poor, highly patriarchial societies. There's a lot more detail in the articles on various source countries and destination countries with different results. https://substack.com/@tomaspueyo?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=45obxc
Just listing some random cases doesn't really achieve or demonstrate anything. If these were the only ones, then UK asylum seekers would have by far the lowest criminality of any group on earth.
Obviously these are not the only ones- but what's the point of making a big list, then, except to manipulate stupid people who see a long list and think 'that's a lot'?
You're right, the list is just a tiny indicator of the true scale of the problem. The point is that all of these crimes were both entirely optional and generally predictable. They were effectively allowed by political choice. In that context, yes a single murder or rape is 'a lot'.
Well my point is that it doesn’t indicate the scale of the problem at all. If this is 100% of the total, the problem is effectively non-existent. If this is 0.1% of the total, the problem is much more significant.
It’s like if you are trying to get a sense of road safety in the UK and I list ten notable crashes. Given how much driving there is, if there were only those ten, driving would be the safest activity possible. If there are tens of thousands more, then the problem is significant.
Either way, the list tells us literally nothing unless we genuinely thought it was a possibility that the number of incidents was fewer than the number of items on the list. Which, in either the driving analogy or the present case of violent crime by asylum seekers, was not a realistic possibility.
Any group of that size, be it asylum seekers or monks sworn to chastity and solitude, is going to produce some examples of horrific crime. Citing a few examples gives us literally zero useful information.
Putting to one side the argument about the lack of available data - which, after all, is the central point of the article - the analogy with traffic accidents does not work for two reasons.
First, traffic accidents are generally the result of randomness or negligence, whereas the serious crimes highlighted in this article involve deliberate intent and malice.
Second, and more importantly, the nature of state responsibility is entirely different. The state cannot control a driver's sudden negligence on a highway, but it does have a strict, gatekeeping responsibility over who is permitted to enter the civil space.
Listing sixty serious crimes by migrants and asylum seekers demonstrates a systemic failure by successive governments in executing that specific gatekeeping duty.
You’ve completely misunderstood the analogy if you think either of those distinctions are relevant.
The point is that listing random examples gives you no idea of the scale of the problem, since any list of examples will necessarily be a small portion. This is true for crimes or driving incidents. The fact one category is deliberate acts and the other is accidents isn’t relevant to the analogy.
Listing sixty tells us literally nothing, because sixty is effectively zero. There would be sixty regardless of what the government did, and if there were only sixty the government would be doing something quite incredible. So such a list can tell us nothing about the government’s success or failure in this area.
Jack, thanks for clarifying. I understand your point about group sizes and the total numbers involved, but the traffic analogy still collapses because it treats these crimes as statistics we just have to accept.
When you say 'sixty is effectively zero' and would happen regardless of government action, you assume these incidents are unpreventable, random occurrences.
If any of those sixty serious crimes were committed by individuals with existing criminal records, flagged security risks, or failed asylum claims who evaded deportation, then those crimes were entirely preventable. They exist because of specific, identifiable lapses in vetting and enforcement.
A government cannot control the baseline criminality of its native population, but it has total control over its borders.
When sixty preventable, high-harm crimes occur because the gatekeeping failed, it isn't a statistical irrelevance - it is a policy failure. That is why the scale matters, and why the analogy with random road accidents doesn't apply.
> When sixty preventable, high-harm crimes occur because the gatekeeping failed, it isn't a statistical irrelevance - it is a policy failure. That is why the scale matters, and why the analogy with random road accidents doesn't apply.
But the analogy doesn't require that they be similar in every (or any) way. Of course some of those crimes may have been preventable, unlike traffic accidents (although of course they can be preventable too).
But the analogy is about the evidential value of lists of anecdotes, so it literally doesn't matter what the content of those lists are, or whether they are similar to each other. It could be a list of people called Gerard, or a list of oranges with slight indents. The point is that listing examples tells us nothing when we already knew there were many more examples than contained in the list.
Anything else you want to say about the content of the list is irrelevant to that point.
Publishing a data point assumes you will do something about it. This government has no intention of doing anything about it no matter how horrendous the situation becomes.
What's more, if you publish, the general public will then see the problem and demand accountability. And we can't have that can we...
Thanks Neil. I’m not a conservative or reform supporter but I agree that the asylum system is not working and is causing immense dissatisfaction among the British public. I’d have an immediate returns policy for people entering illegally and we’d need a third country hub as well for people without ID and refusing to say where they are from. If the ECHR prevents this then ideally we’d reform it with agreement of other signatories - all European countries have the same problem- or we have to withdraw.
But we should not completely abdicate our asylum responsibilities nor should we discourage immigration completely. We need the ability to apply for asylum for genuine refugees from outside the uk. And we should allow some low income legal migration too.
Any civilised country will have a human rights act. The Human Rights Act 1998 (the Act) 2000 sets out the fundamental rights and freedoms that everyone in the UK is entitled to. It incorporates the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic British law. The Human Rights Act came into force in the UK in October 2000.
The proposed Conservative ‘Borders Plan’, which Neil O'Brien MP sets out, changes. They propose leaving the ECHR and ECAT, repealing the Human Rights Act, and introducing a total ban on asylum claims for illegal entrants.
This will not provide the UK with a fair plan for genuine asylum seekers and subsequently, remove the UK from the list of civilised countries.
An asylum-seeker is someone who is seeking international protection. Their request for refugee status, or complementary protection status, has yet to be processed, or they may not yet have requested asylum but they intend to do so.
War, persecution and human rights violations force people to flee their homes. To escape violence or threats to their lives or freedoms, many must leave with just a few moments' notice, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs.
When someone crosses an international border seeking safety, they often need to apply to be legally recognised as a refugee. While they seek asylum and await the outcome of their application, they are referred to as asylum-seekers and should be protected. Not all asylum-seekers will be found to be refugees, but all refugees were once asylum-seekers.
The problem is that we don’t have an efficient method of categorising refugees. Assuming that if they don’t have a UK-sounding name, they are assumed, by many, to be illegals. If, as well as your name, you have to produce a documented proof of your current status – for example, an ID card – and it is logged centrally, and it is part of the ID, we will always have this problem.
I always carry a passport. I would sooner carry a passport or ID card ( even if it is provided by Palantir ! ) than go through this fiasco. As an ex-exec, this would be cheaper to implement than any alternative. Just don’t give the contract to Fujitsu!
You're right, bad or missing statistics can lead to bad policy choices or recommendations. The question is not, do immigrants commit offences. It's are they much more likely to do so than other people? I was surprised to find that in 24-5 there were 200,000+ sexual offences recorded, of which 70,000+ were rapes, so more than 500 sex offences PER DAY. So, are asylum seekers/immigrants worse or better than the rest of us? There's no data.
We all know what needs to be done and there is a party that endorses this - Restore Britain
Unfortunately liberals (and I include the 2010-2024 Conservative Party in this) can, to butcher a famous Winston Churchill quote, always be trusted to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Hopefully we're reaching the point where everything is seen to have been tried.
This list of offences is a drop on the ocean compared to the suffering that Restore's policies would cause- do you not care because they're not British?
Why do you consider that to be suffering? They migrated once by choice. They can migrate back. It's not even proposed to make them take a dinghy the other way either.
Many of these people have been here for literal decades. Their lives and their families are here.
Some of my clients had been here so long they had no memories of their “home” country. How would you like it if you suddenly have to move back to Somalia?
Some are political dissidents who will be tortured and killed if they are returned. Others would just be plunged back into famine, disease, slavery rape as a weapon, conscription of their children, and so on.
Here are some testimonies that help convey the horrors that the “remigration” euphemism conceals:
And this is with the normal processes that you people think are too kind and rights-respecting. When scaled up to the kind of enormous mass immigration Restore proposes, conditions and caution about respecting the rights of deportees (even the rights you would recognise, like not to be starved or tortured) would necessarily have to be significantly lessened if not abandoned altogether.
It shouldn’t really need to be explained to someone advocating the policy what it actually involves. But I suspect if people actually thought about what mass deportation means, it would have even less support than it currently does.
You do a great service to the British people. Depressing to read and probably more so to research. Even so, essential work that no other politician, as far as I can see, is doing.
I've found a series of Substack articles by Tomas Pueyo that analyse the question of whether immigrants are more likely to commit crime. The broad answer seems to be yes. Partly because young men immigrate more than others but largely the effect is related to immigration from 'low trust', poor, highly patriarchial societies. There's a lot more detail in the articles on various source countries and destination countries with different results. https://substack.com/@tomaspueyo?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=45obxc
Just listing some random cases doesn't really achieve or demonstrate anything. If these were the only ones, then UK asylum seekers would have by far the lowest criminality of any group on earth.
Obviously these are not the only ones- but what's the point of making a big list, then, except to manipulate stupid people who see a long list and think 'that's a lot'?
You're right, the list is just a tiny indicator of the true scale of the problem. The point is that all of these crimes were both entirely optional and generally predictable. They were effectively allowed by political choice. In that context, yes a single murder or rape is 'a lot'.
Well my point is that it doesn’t indicate the scale of the problem at all. If this is 100% of the total, the problem is effectively non-existent. If this is 0.1% of the total, the problem is much more significant.
It’s like if you are trying to get a sense of road safety in the UK and I list ten notable crashes. Given how much driving there is, if there were only those ten, driving would be the safest activity possible. If there are tens of thousands more, then the problem is significant.
Either way, the list tells us literally nothing unless we genuinely thought it was a possibility that the number of incidents was fewer than the number of items on the list. Which, in either the driving analogy or the present case of violent crime by asylum seekers, was not a realistic possibility.
Any group of that size, be it asylum seekers or monks sworn to chastity and solitude, is going to produce some examples of horrific crime. Citing a few examples gives us literally zero useful information.
Putting to one side the argument about the lack of available data - which, after all, is the central point of the article - the analogy with traffic accidents does not work for two reasons.
First, traffic accidents are generally the result of randomness or negligence, whereas the serious crimes highlighted in this article involve deliberate intent and malice.
Second, and more importantly, the nature of state responsibility is entirely different. The state cannot control a driver's sudden negligence on a highway, but it does have a strict, gatekeeping responsibility over who is permitted to enter the civil space.
Listing sixty serious crimes by migrants and asylum seekers demonstrates a systemic failure by successive governments in executing that specific gatekeeping duty.
You’ve completely misunderstood the analogy if you think either of those distinctions are relevant.
The point is that listing random examples gives you no idea of the scale of the problem, since any list of examples will necessarily be a small portion. This is true for crimes or driving incidents. The fact one category is deliberate acts and the other is accidents isn’t relevant to the analogy.
Listing sixty tells us literally nothing, because sixty is effectively zero. There would be sixty regardless of what the government did, and if there were only sixty the government would be doing something quite incredible. So such a list can tell us nothing about the government’s success or failure in this area.
Jack, thanks for clarifying. I understand your point about group sizes and the total numbers involved, but the traffic analogy still collapses because it treats these crimes as statistics we just have to accept.
When you say 'sixty is effectively zero' and would happen regardless of government action, you assume these incidents are unpreventable, random occurrences.
If any of those sixty serious crimes were committed by individuals with existing criminal records, flagged security risks, or failed asylum claims who evaded deportation, then those crimes were entirely preventable. They exist because of specific, identifiable lapses in vetting and enforcement.
A government cannot control the baseline criminality of its native population, but it has total control over its borders.
When sixty preventable, high-harm crimes occur because the gatekeeping failed, it isn't a statistical irrelevance - it is a policy failure. That is why the scale matters, and why the analogy with random road accidents doesn't apply.
> When sixty preventable, high-harm crimes occur because the gatekeeping failed, it isn't a statistical irrelevance - it is a policy failure. That is why the scale matters, and why the analogy with random road accidents doesn't apply.
But the analogy doesn't require that they be similar in every (or any) way. Of course some of those crimes may have been preventable, unlike traffic accidents (although of course they can be preventable too).
But the analogy is about the evidential value of lists of anecdotes, so it literally doesn't matter what the content of those lists are, or whether they are similar to each other. It could be a list of people called Gerard, or a list of oranges with slight indents. The point is that listing examples tells us nothing when we already knew there were many more examples than contained in the list.
Anything else you want to say about the content of the list is irrelevant to that point.
Publishing a data point assumes you will do something about it. This government has no intention of doing anything about it no matter how horrendous the situation becomes.
What's more, if you publish, the general public will then see the problem and demand accountability. And we can't have that can we...
Thanks Neil. I’m not a conservative or reform supporter but I agree that the asylum system is not working and is causing immense dissatisfaction among the British public. I’d have an immediate returns policy for people entering illegally and we’d need a third country hub as well for people without ID and refusing to say where they are from. If the ECHR prevents this then ideally we’d reform it with agreement of other signatories - all European countries have the same problem- or we have to withdraw.
But we should not completely abdicate our asylum responsibilities nor should we discourage immigration completely. We need the ability to apply for asylum for genuine refugees from outside the uk. And we should allow some low income legal migration too.
As with many of your articles, it all sounds sensible up until we consider the record of the last government that you supported and were part of.
If that government had been even halfway decent we wouldn't have this problem.
What is the Steelman excuse for having bad data?
Any civilised country will have a human rights act. The Human Rights Act 1998 (the Act) 2000 sets out the fundamental rights and freedoms that everyone in the UK is entitled to. It incorporates the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic British law. The Human Rights Act came into force in the UK in October 2000.
The proposed Conservative ‘Borders Plan’, which Neil O'Brien MP sets out, changes. They propose leaving the ECHR and ECAT, repealing the Human Rights Act, and introducing a total ban on asylum claims for illegal entrants.
This will not provide the UK with a fair plan for genuine asylum seekers and subsequently, remove the UK from the list of civilised countries.
An asylum-seeker is someone who is seeking international protection. Their request for refugee status, or complementary protection status, has yet to be processed, or they may not yet have requested asylum but they intend to do so.
War, persecution and human rights violations force people to flee their homes. To escape violence or threats to their lives or freedoms, many must leave with just a few moments' notice, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs.
When someone crosses an international border seeking safety, they often need to apply to be legally recognised as a refugee. While they seek asylum and await the outcome of their application, they are referred to as asylum-seekers and should be protected. Not all asylum-seekers will be found to be refugees, but all refugees were once asylum-seekers.
The problem is that we don’t have an efficient method of categorising refugees. Assuming that if they don’t have a UK-sounding name, they are assumed, by many, to be illegals. If, as well as your name, you have to produce a documented proof of your current status – for example, an ID card – and it is logged centrally, and it is part of the ID, we will always have this problem.
I always carry a passport. I would sooner carry a passport or ID card ( even if it is provided by Palantir ! ) than go through this fiasco. As an ex-exec, this would be cheaper to implement than any alternative. Just don’t give the contract to Fujitsu!
You're right, bad or missing statistics can lead to bad policy choices or recommendations. The question is not, do immigrants commit offences. It's are they much more likely to do so than other people? I was surprised to find that in 24-5 there were 200,000+ sexual offences recorded, of which 70,000+ were rapes, so more than 500 sex offences PER DAY. So, are asylum seekers/immigrants worse or better than the rest of us? There's no data.
Yeah a list of some random offences committed by asylum seekers is worse than nothing. It tells us nothing at best, and misleads at worst.
There are data though.
https://www.migrationcentral.co.uk/p/over-100000-foreign-national-convictions
Very interesting ; but unvalidated. Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GreenAndPleasant/comments/1j8agii/who_is_the_centre_for_migration_control/?solution=8d4af24af9176a168d4af24af9176a16&js_challenge=1&token=bbbe4bf1c9a2b5160829c4be34da58614aed32e1a25940266ca85a87217d24a8&jsc_orig_r=
We all know what needs to be done and there is a party that endorses this - Restore Britain
Unfortunately liberals (and I include the 2010-2024 Conservative Party in this) can, to butcher a famous Winston Churchill quote, always be trusted to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Hopefully we're reaching the point where everything is seen to have been tried.
This list of offences is a drop on the ocean compared to the suffering that Restore's policies would cause- do you not care because they're not British?
What suffering is that then?
Of “remigrating” millions of people?
Why do you consider that to be suffering? They migrated once by choice. They can migrate back. It's not even proposed to make them take a dinghy the other way either.
Many of these people have been here for literal decades. Their lives and their families are here.
Some of my clients had been here so long they had no memories of their “home” country. How would you like it if you suddenly have to move back to Somalia?
Some are political dissidents who will be tortured and killed if they are returned. Others would just be plunged back into famine, disease, slavery rape as a weapon, conscription of their children, and so on.
Here are some testimonies that help convey the horrors that the “remigration” euphemism conceals:
https://libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/revealed-horrors-of-self-harm-and-desperation-on-failed-rwanda-flight/
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brook-house-migrant-detention-centres-b2415124.html
https://inusnews.com/u-s-deportation-horror-of-a-girl-with-brain-cancer/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/when-deportation-is-a-death-sentence
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326764399_Statement_on_the_Effects_of_Deportation_and_Forced_Separation_on_Immigrants_their_Families_and_Communities
And this is with the normal processes that you people think are too kind and rights-respecting. When scaled up to the kind of enormous mass immigration Restore proposes, conditions and caution about respecting the rights of deportees (even the rights you would recognise, like not to be starved or tortured) would necessarily have to be significantly lessened if not abandoned altogether.
It shouldn’t really need to be explained to someone advocating the policy what it actually involves. But I suspect if people actually thought about what mass deportation means, it would have even less support than it currently does.
You do a great service to the British people. Depressing to read and probably more so to research. Even so, essential work that no other politician, as far as I can see, is doing.