Economist Accidentally Reports on Migrant Stats: Immediately Backpedals

Today on Based Camp we discuss the shock people experienced when the Economist (of all outlets!) published data from UK Ministry of Justice records showing Afghan nationals to be convicted of sexual offenses at roughly seven times the rate of British nationals, with Middle East and North Africa groups at 3.6 times and Sub-Saharan Africa at 2.5 times. We examine the original and revised charts, similar patterns in Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands, and the legal risks of discussing such statistics in the UK.

We also discuss how the Economist’s team handled population adjustments for age and sex, comparisons to raw conviction counts, reactions from online analysts, and what the data suggests about migration impacts across Europe, noting shifts in public discourse and political positions on immigration controls.

It’s rather amusing that the Economist decided to step in this arena at all. Is the Overton Window shifting? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Show Notes

Given that people in the UK are sent to jail for inciting racial hatred*, the internet is now truly shocked by a chart that The Economist used Ministry of Justice data standardised for age and sex to show Afghan nationals at roughly 7x the British conviction rate for sexual offenses, Middle East and North Africa at ~3.6x and sub-Saharan Africa at ~2.5x, with EU and East Asian groups below baseline

“I’m shocked that The Economist was willing to publish this!” wrote Cremieux

Andris K Berzins noted that “The Economist article this chart comes from (https://economist.com/britain/2026/10/25/do-immigrants-from-some-countries-commit-more-sex-crimes) tries to play down the discrepancy. But the data (shown on a linear rather than log scale as in the original article) is alarming indeed. The Economist’s conclusion, that in absolute terms the difference in sex crimes is not alarming, hides the fact that migration is a real issue and there is a clear impact. 🤷‍♂️”

The original original article makes it look more stark.

GuruAnaerobic showed the data in a different way; doesn’t look good with Alex commenting that ““British Nationals” is doing some heavy work on its own already”

Brian Chau swung in to correct the scale though African Farmer noted he “Should have used dicks instead of fatties.” (I am inclined to agree but Brian keeps it classy)

*For real:

* Lucy Connolly received a 31-month prison sentence in October 2024 after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred. Her post called for mass deportation and said, “set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the b******s for all I care.” This was not a conviction simply for saying that immigration creates crime concerns.

* Tyler Kay received a 38-month sentence in August 2024 for an X post repeating that call to burn hotels housing asylum seekers. The judge’s published sentencing remarks reproduce the post and identify the offence as publishing material that stirred up racial hatred. He did not need to participate in a physical attack to be imprisoned for the publication itself.

This went viral, so some riffed on this. Maarten van den Berg looked at stats for Denmark, Norway, and The Netherlands.

The Article

Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?

“In Bristol last November three men and a 17-year-old boy, all Afghans, gang-raped a 17-year-old girl over several hours. Beforehand they had groomed her on Snapchat and plied her with alcohol; afterwards they fled to France in a lorry. The French authorities returned them to Britain, where they were convicted and, on October 6th, sentenced to long jail terms. In court the girl described how “listening to it all again from the lawyers kept me reliving everything that happened to me”.

Such horrors fuel suspicion of migrants. So did a recent state-issued booklet about Britain for asylum-seekers. Page five clarified that the legal age of consent is 16 and that rape is a serious crime. “I’ve never heard of someone who decided not to rape because they received a leaflet,” said Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader. The clumsy campaign fed the idea that some immigrants—notably men seeking asylum—are responsible for a disproportionate share of sex offences. Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, claims that “Afghans are over TWENTY times more likely to commit sex crimes than Brits.”

Is that true? The government does not publish crime rates by immigration status. The limited data it does release are raw counts of offences by those of each nationality, from a country-wide police database. The “20 times” claim was based on there being 13,000 Afghans in Britain, an estimate from the Office for National Statistics’ Annual Population Survey. That figure is unreliable, however, having been extrapolated from a sample of fewer than 60 individuals. In 2021 the ONS stopped publishing this population estimate owing to plummeting survey-response rates.

The Economist’s analysis suggests that the “20 times” claim is a wild exaggeration. But our numbers are hardly reassuring.

The Migration Observatory, a think-tank based at Oxford University, obtained figures through freedom-of-information requests to the Ministry of Justice. These count cautions and convictions in England and Wales, split by offenders’ nationality, between 2010 and 2024. The data detail 8m crimes, of which 106,000 are sex offences ranging from rape to consensual sex in public. The police’s recording of offenders’ nationality is messy, but we found that four-fifths of sex crimes were committed by British people. Just 0.39%—409 offences over the 15-year period—were committed by people who said they were Afghan.

Whether 409 crimes is a lot or a little depends on how many Afghans are in the country. In March 2021 the last census reported 14,300 Afghan passport-holders living in England and Wales, and another 7,100 without a passport who said they were Afghan: a total population of 21,400.

The census is just a snapshot in time. Since 2021 some 3m people have settled in Britain and the foreign-born population has risen from 16% to 19% of the total. After the Taliban seized Kabul, in August 2021, some 38,000 Afghans flocked to Britain over the following year and a half. Accounting for those who later left and those who became citizens, we estimate that the Afghan population of England and Wales had doubled to 45,000 by the end of 2022.

To capture more than the snapshot we analysed convictions during a three-year period, 2020-22, and averaged our population estimate over those three years. We then standardised our estimate to account for age and sex (men commit 98% of sex crimes, for example, and Afghans are about ten years younger than the population at large). This suggested Afghans are convicted of sex crimes at seven times the British rate—a far cry from Mr Timothy’s “over 20 times”, but disturbing nevertheless (see char