'Is mass immigration making Europe unsafe?'
Perceived criminality versus the figures
Those who proclaim Diversity™️ to be our strength — our greatest strength — possess a superhuman skill for overlooking the consequence of mass migration. Their hope for the future lies not in the past, and the achievements of their ancestors, but in the immigrants who arrive from the Third World. They are alert and ready to work. Their brights faces proclaim their virtue. They are vessels —lifeboats. Their bodies shelter sacred souls which are immune to the corrupting influence of civilisation.
This image is a romanticised hang-over from the Second World War when people from all corners of the globe travelled to Europe to fight and to rebuild. This is a vision of a communitarian world in which the forces of evil and despair are vanquished by collaboration and charity. Whilst this spirit of friendship can be found in individuals the world over, a fatal mistake has been made in ascribing such generosity to ‘groups’ — be it people grouped by race, sex, religion or ‘refugee status’.
As Britain and Europe has been discovering, not all immigrants are benevolent, and the cry of ‘mass deportation’ is growing louder. The sum total of our immigrant population is no longer good-humoured Rastafarians, self-motivated Nigerian doctors, or quiet, patriotic Indian families. Perhaps, this pageant of generosity has only ever been the figment of the English imagination. Whilst, at an interpersonal level, people must continue to be judged as individuals, cultures are not equal in their ability to produce ‘good’ people. And whilst all philosophies and religions are vulnerable to decay and corruption, it remains the case that, across time, some cultures prove themselves to be better than others at producing peaceful, principled, and prosperous people.
Whether one admits to knowing this or not, everyone operates under the suspicion that this is true: they plan their movements knowing that some areas of the city, country, and the world are safer to travel to than others for reasons of crime, conflict, political and religious persecution, medical resources, and sanitation.
If it were impossible to draw distinctions between the quality of nations, cultures, and peoples, one would unable to draw maps, such as these travel indexes, that indicate the relative safety of each country.
Whilst is perhaps impossible to characterise any individual by the ‘safety’ risk of their country — you can find a sinner in Iceland and a saint in Haiti — you can at least predict the likelihood of encountering saint or sinner from these indexes.
Iceland is one the safest countries in the world whilst Haiti one of the most dangerous, particularly in terms of their homicide rate. The nordic country has a homicide rate of 1.1 per hundred thousand people and sees 3-4 murders a year. Iceland has known only one mass-murderer in its history — Axlar-Björn (c. 1555–1596) who killed between 9-18 people of the course of his life. Singapore’s homicide rate is even lower than Iceland’s, with only 0.07 deaths per 100,000 people. This equates to an average of 4 murders a year.
Haiti, by comparison, sees between 4000-5000 murders each year; and whilst the country has a much larger population than Iceland and Singapore, the current homicide rate is 41.1 per hundred thousand people. It is only beaten in deadliness by Ecuador (45.7 per hundred thousand) and Jamaica (49.3 per hundred thousand).
Are European nations becoming increasingly unsafe?
It certainly feels like the streets of United Kingdom and Europe are, in broad strokes, ‘less safe’ than back in the 1990s — before mass surveillance, before mass migration into Europe, and 9/11 our relationship with changed international borders and travel. But is Europe really becoming increasingly unsafe? Is it ‘divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric’ as Right-wing commentators are often accused of perpetuating, or, could it be that Europe is as safe as it ever has been but the type of threat has changed?
In recent years, many European counties have had their ‘threat level’ upgraded from ‘negligible risk’ to ‘low risk’. A threat level predicts the likelihood of an individual falling victim to crime, injury, or serious illness whilst going about their daily life in a particular country or region. Some have attributed the increased threat in Europe to the Russia-Ukraine War. Others have attributed it to the increasing political instability — the purported rise of ‘far-right’ extremism — and the threat of terrorism. I would engage in less handwringing and make a somewhat educated guess that the rapid demographic shift in these countries plays a significant role in the increased disruption, danger and fear being experienced by those living in Europe.
Sweden provides perhaps the best case study in Europe as to the impact of mass immigration upon a small population in a short amount of time. In the early 2010s, Sweden was considered one of the safest countries in the world, ranking 13th out of 144 countries on the Global Peace Index. At this time, the Swedish population had been 9.5 million with 85-90 per cent of people being Swedish by descent. The immigrant population was constituted of Fins from the neighbouring country of Finland, along with settled refugees from the former Yugoslavia and economic migrants from Poland.
Their global peace score began to decrease, however, after 2015 and in 2024 Sweden had ranked 39th in the word for safety, being beating by Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman:
2015 — 14th
2016 — 16th
2017 — 22nd
2018 — 22nd
2019 — 20th
2020 — 22nd
2021 — 25th
2022 — 31st
2023 — 34th
2024 — 39th
In this time, the total population of Sweden has increased by 1.1 million people. The natural population of Sweden has grown by 7,000-10,000 year-on-year as a result of births out pacing-deaths. This means that of the 1.1 million person increase, Sweden’s received between 950,000-995,00 legal migrants in the last fifteen years.
The foreign-born population has also doubled from 10 per cent to 20 per cent with the largest constituency immigrating from Syria, Iraq, Finland, Iran, Somalia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Eritrea. The Polish population in Sweden has grown by 10,000 people over the last 15 years, from whilst the Syrian population has grown from 15,000 to almost 200,000. There are twice as many Syrians in Sweden now as Polish.
As I recently covered in The Critic Magazine, Sweden has since seen a experienced a dramatic spike in the number of drive-by shootings, bombings, and grenade attacks as a result of blood feuds between rival drug gangs from foreign countries.
But Sweden is not the only country to suffer a decline in general safety. Other countries in Europe have seen a similar decline in their global safety ranking over the past two decades, including Hungry which has dropped from 8th place to 14th, Poland which has dropped from 23rd to 32nd, and France which has dropped from 46th to to a staggering 87th — Senegal, Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan and Sierra Leone are all regarded safer to visit than France in 2024.