More facts
What does the data say overall?
The reality is that the government’s own data cannot tell us how many crimes are committed by asylum seekers because the Ministry of Justice does not record offences by immigration status. As such, there is no official way to compare offending rates of asylum seekers with the wider population.
There are various proxies but none of them give a cast iron answer. For example, information on crime is collected by nationality but that only gets us so far.
The category “foreign nationals’’ lumps together a wide mix of people: recent arrivals, long-settled immigrants, students, health and care workers, their dependants, and also asylum seekers.
With that context in mind, the figures we do have show that, overall, foreign nationals in England and Wales are imprisoned or convicted at roughly the same rate as British nationals, according to analysis by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.