New analysis has suggested foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences compared to British citizens.
It is the first study of its kind by the Centre for Migration Control of data from police forces, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
There were more than 9,000 arrests made of foreign nationals for sexual offences in the first 10 months of last year in 41 of the 43 forces in England and Wales.
Compared to British suspects, foreigners were three-and-a-half times as likely to be arrested for sex offences, based on a rate of nearly 165 arrests per 100,000 of the migrant population against 48 per 100,000 for Britons.
New analysis by the Centre for Migration Control has revealed the statisticsGettyFor all crimes, Albanians were the nationality most likely to be arrested, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Algerians and Somalians.
There were 48 nationalities with a higher arrest rate per 1,000 people than British suspects.
According to the figures, released under freedom of information (FOI) laws, foreign nationals were arrested at twice the rate of British natives, accounting for 131,000 of the arrests from January to October 2024.
While foreigners make up nine per cent of the population, they accounted for 16.1 per cent of the total number of arrests.
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Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said the data would enable the Home Office to tighten visa and deportation policies for nationalities linked to higher rates of crime in the UK
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It comes as senior Conservative MPs have been urging both Labour and the Tories to publish data that would enable league tables of the crime rates of nations’ migrants to be compiled.
The practice is done in Denmark and some US states, and a backbench amendment to Rishi Sunak’s Sentencing Bill would have required the government to present a report to Parliament each year detailing the nationality, visa and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts in the previous 12 months.
However, the bill was abandoned following Rishi Sunak's announcement of a General Election on May 22 last year.
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said the data would enable the Home Office to tighten visa and deportation policies for nationalities linked to higher rates of crime in the UK, adding: "There is not a single good reason why the Ministry of Justice shouldn’t publish this in full, completely transparently, on a regular basis."
It comes after figures showed the number of migrants arriving in the UK in 2024 by crossing the English Channel in small boats was up by a quarter on the previous year.
Labour faced opposition accusations of having "lost control of our borders" as Home Office data suggested 36,816 people made the journey last year.
There are usually more small boat arrivals in the second half of the year because the weather in summer and autumn is generally more favourable, with days on which the wind and wave levels in the Channel are most conducive to crossings referred to as "red days."
Home Office sources said there were 88 such days in the second half of 2024 compared with 50 in the second half of 2023, citing this as the key reason for the difference in the number of arrivals between those periods.
