Britain to Record Illegal Alien Crime Data. Why Not America?
While information on illegal alien crimes is often hard to find or even intentionally obscured in the U.S., the UK will now publicly record details of migrant crimes. This information will include the immigration and visa status of criminals and their nationality. The announcement of this plan for data tracking in England and Wales comes as the UK is rocked by news of the record high net migration of 745,000 people per year and a series of high profile crimes linked to migrants. The prospect of this plan has caused outrage among the usual suspects, but is a welcome move to provide more transparency to the debate on mass migration and its social impact.
The British public certainly deserves this transparency given recent harrowing cases involving migrant suspects with several different legal statuses. Earlier this month, a young mother was stabbed to death in Yorkshire as she pushed her baby in a stroller. The suspect is Bangladeshi national, Habibur Masum, a 25-year-old who entered Britain on a student visa and was out on bail for previously threatening to kill her. In January 2023, Afghan asylum seeker Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai was convicted of murdering a young man in Dorset, having previously been convicted of a double murder in Serbia. Just one month later, in February 2023, four Afghans were arrested after gang raping a girl at the school in Kent they were attending. These high-profile cases have made headlines, and now more detailed large-scale data about migrants will be available so the public can hear the full story behind these cases.
While Britain is moving towards more transparency and openness about the community safety effects of mass immigration, America largely fails to do so. The crimes committed by aliens in the U.S., especially violent crimes, are one of the very worst aspects of insecure borders because they are entirely preventable. Media reports of crimes in the U.S. often do not mention the migration status of the suspect, either because “sanctuary” jurisdictions do not record it and/or because sections of the U.S. media reporting on these crimes actively seek to downplay or leave out the information about migration status.
The murder of Laken Riley in Georgia by a Venezuelan national who was let into the U.S. through immigration parole and was then released by New York City after being charged with endangerment of a child is one recent and high profile example, but there are many others. In February 2019, a woman was gang raped in Kuna, Idaho. The suspects were reported in one news headline as “Boise teens”, but it turns out that three of the four were refugees from Tanzania while the status of the fourth was not revealed. In December 2023, the press reported on a drunk driving “Boulder man” who killed a mother and her teenage son in Colorado, despite the fact the “Boulder man” is an illegal alien from El Salvador who had been deported from the U.S. four separate times prior to the deadly crime. This obfuscation denies Americans their right to know who is committing crimes and how they ended up in the U.S. in the first place.
One of the most frequent requests FAIR receives from the public is for information about illegal alien crimes committed in their home states. Unfortunately, only one U.S. state, Texas, specifically records the number and nature of crimes committed by illegal aliens. Between June 2011 and March 2024, over 432,000 criminal aliens, 303,000 of them in the U.S. illegally, were booked into Texas jails. These arrests resulted in over 190,000 convictions, including over 25,000 drug offenses, over 3,400 sexual offenses, and 471 homicides. If these statistics are anything to go by, they paint a worrying picture of the potential scale and impact of alien crime in other states. Because other states have chosen not to record these data like Texas has done, the public and other interested organizations in those states will remain unable to provide an accurate and detailed picture of the total scale of the phenomenon.
FAIR maintains a database of serious crimes committed by illegal aliens, which we catalogue when the immigration status of the suspect is unambiguously clear. If other states were to follow the lead of England, Wales and Texas in routinely recording the immigration status of the suspects in all crimes, the public would be much better informed.