Migration and Violent Crime in Germany: Police Statistics and Debate

Germany has a problem, one the media hide, twist with framing, and sometimes flat out lie about: migration.

But with these numbers, they can't. This is your daily dose of research.

First, what are we even looking at? The PKS is Germany's official police crime statistic.

It counts suspects, not convictions, and the government just published how often each nationality shows up.

Here's violent crime, and it's not just one category: rape, killings, robbery.

Iraqis, Afghans, and Syrians are at the top in every single one.

Insane numbers. But of course, the media have answers.

So let's take them apart one by one. Argument one: racist victims who report foreigners more and racist police who check them more.

Police checks catch small stuff: drugs, fare dodging, residence violations.

None of that is in this table. Victims do report foreign offenders more often.

But are foreigners falsely accused? Then they'd be convicted less often.

They aren't, and killings and attempted killings mostly come to the police anyway, and that's exactly where the gap is biggest.

Reporting can't explain that. Argument two: they're just young men.

Young men commit more crime everywhere. So let's compare young men with young men, same sex, same age.

Even at the same age, the gap stays, and Poles and Ukrainians land right next to Germans.

So it's not foreigners in general, it's where they come from.

And keep in mind who counts as German here.

Everyone who got citizenship, which means German numbers already include part of the migrant population.

Argument three: poverty, education, and the neighborhood.

Control for all that, and the difference disappears. It doesn't.

Denmark tracks crime by origin, not passport, and controls for age and work.

Men from the Middle East and North Africa still end up far above Danes.

Their sons born in Denmark, even higher.

In Germany, social status explains only a small part of the violence gap.

But you shouldn't even control for income like that because income doesn't cause crime.

Sibling and lottery studies make that clear, and one new study gets the gap all the way down to zero. How?

By also controlling for how much teenagers approve of violence.

That's like saying smokers don't get more lung cancer once you control for tar, because the approval of violence is the difference.

And then the media's favorite counter proof, the Ifo study.

More foreigners in a district doesn't mean more crime.

Here's what it really shows: foreigners are suspects far more often than Germans.

The study says so itself. It then looks at whole districts, and the effect only disappears after controlling for local German crime and unemployment, things migration itself can influence.

Over time, it looks at just six years. So the study doesn't show that foreigners aren't more criminal.

It confirms they are. Anyone using it as proof that they aren't either hasn't read it or is misrepresenting it on purpose.

So does migration from these countries cause more crime in Germany?

Yes, causally. Take a million Germans and a million Syrians, and yes, many of them are young men. That's not an excuse.

That's the reality of who comes. Those are suspects that wouldn't exist in this country without that migration.

Nobody gets robbed or stabbed less because someone else did it.

You barely see it in the overall numbers yet because these groups are still a small part of the population.

But every extra person from these countries adds that risk, and every politician who pushes for more migration from these countries knowing these numbers accepts it.

In reality, about ten times the risk, and even compared to German men of the exact same age, still four to five times.

The victims are real people, and those politicians have blood on their hands.