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.

Not new but different

This finding is in line with the academic consensus.

"These insights aren't actually new," the study's co-author Jean-Victor Alipour told DW. "It just proves what has already been proven, not just for Germany but for many other countries: Namely that there is no systematic connection between immigration and criminality."

What is new about the study, according to Dirk Baier, professor at the Institute of Delinquency and Crime Prevention at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), is the focus on regional differences and local data to make the same point. 

"Up to now we had survey-based studies, where we asked mainly young people about their criminal behavior, but here they took the criminality data for all the 400 districts in Germany and investigated the correlations," Baier, who did not work on the report, told DW.

By including this data, the ifo researchers say they have produced a "fairer" analysis that includes demographic comparisons between districts.

The study also pointed to a gap between the perception of immigrant communities and the reality.

"That doesn't just pertain to criminality, but also the fact the education level of immigrants is systematically underestimated, while the sheer number of immigrants is overestimated," said Alipour. "In many ways, immigration is much more negatively perceived than can be shown in the data."

There are many possible reasons for this, said Alipour, who pointed to the studies showing that the media reports on immigrant crime much more frequently, and for much longer.

"That leads to the fact that safety risk is often associated with immigration — and now we have more and more political parties and actors who try to create political capital out of this diffuse fear," he said.

Dirk Baier of the ZHAW also said that other studies have shown there many other reasons why immigrants appear more often in police crime statistics: For instance, it appears that charges are pressed less often when there is a German perpetrator and a German victim than when there is an immigrant perpetrator and a German victim.

"That might have something to do with xenophobic attitudes, it might be something to do with the fact in certain situations people can't find other ways to deal with conflicts — maybe because you can't communicate in the same language," said Baier. "We don't know, but the likelihood that an immigrant perpetrator will appear in the statistics is higher."

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

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