{
  "schema_version": "immigrationdb-research-article-v1",
  "slug": "foreign-population-recorded-crime",
  "url": "https://immigrationdb.com/research/foreign-population-recorded-crime/",
  "title": "More foreign residents, more crime? The answer changes at every border",
  "headline": "More foreign residents, more crime? The answer changes at every border",
  "question": "Does a higher share of foreign residents go together with a higher recorded-crime rate in cities, and does the result hold within countries?",
  "summary": "Does a larger foreign population mean more recorded crime? It depends on the country: 0.06 in Germany and the US, 0.50 in Spain and Belgium, 0.59 in the Netherlands.",
  "published": "2026-08-04",
  "updated": "2026-08-04",
  "author": "Maksim Streltcov",
  "license": "https://immigrationdb.com/legal/terms/",
  "sections": [
    "What we measured",
    "What the data shows",
    "Where it breaks down",
    "What this means if you are moving",
    "Limits",
    "Method",
    "Sources"
  ],
  "faq": [
    {
      "q": "Does immigration increase crime according to these data?",
      "a": "These data cannot answer whether immigration increases crime. Across 4,703 cities, the pooled Spearman coefficient is 0.28, but the six reportable country coefficients range from 0.06 to 0.59. The unit is a city, so the analysis cannot identify what any resident does, establish causation or measure an immigration flow."
    },
    {
      "q": "Why can’t recorded-crime rates be compared directly across countries?",
      "a": "Police-recorded crime depends on what is reported, detected, classified and published under each national system. A rate from one country is therefore not directly equivalent to a rate from another. This analysis compares how cities rank within countries; it does not rank countries by crime level."
    },
    {
      "q": "Which country has the largest city-level correlation?",
      "a": "Among countries with at least 20 cities, the Netherlands has the largest Spearman coefficient at 0.59 for 40 cities. Spain and Belgium are both 0.50, for 303 and 316 cities. Germany is 0.06 for 133 and the United States 0.06 for 3,818. These are city-level associations, not causal estimates or statements about foreign residents."
    },
    {
      "q": "What should someone moving to a city use instead?",
      "a": "Use the city’s own recorded-crime rate, observation year and source definition, and compare it with cities covered by the same national reporting system. Do not treat foreign-population share as a shortcut for safety. The analysis shows that its association with recorded crime changes substantially by country."
    },
    {
      "q": "Why use Spearman correlation for this analysis?",
      "a": "Spearman correlation compares ranks rather than raw distances between values. That makes the result less dependent on extreme city values and more appropriate when variables are skewed or not linearly related. Each city receives equal weight, and the coefficient describes association only."
    }
  ],
  "countries": [
    "germany",
    "spain",
    "netherlands"
  ],
  "answer": "Question: in cities with more foreign residents, is more crime recorded? Answer: it depends on the country, and the differences between countries are larger than the pattern itself. In Germany and the United States the two barely move together. In the Netherlands , Spain and Belgium they move together substantially. Any single figure quoted for Europe is an average of countries that disagree with each other. The numbers: 0.06 in Germany across 133 cities and 0.06 in the United States across 3,818; 0.50 in Spain across 303 and in Belgium across 316; 0.59 in the Netherlands across 40. Pooling all 4,703 cities gives 0.28 — a figure that describes which countries happen to be in the sample, not any city in it."
}