The Fatal Flaws of the “Far Center”

A few weeks ago I had a Twitter-spat with Edward Luce. Luce is a British journalist and chief US commentator for the Financial Times. I reacted to Luce when he blamed the recent race riots in Britain, which broke out in response to three young girls being stabbed to death by the son of Rwandan refugees, on Elon Musk. Musk had taken to Twitter to criticize the British government’s two-tier policing and threats of censorship in response to the disorder, which, according to Luce, made him the real “menace to democracy”:

I was irked by this post, and responded that, on the contrary, the people stoking ethnic conflict are our politicians. In particular, the blame lies with those who have recklessly imposed unprecedented levels of mass immigration without public consent or concern for the consequences. You have only to look at Africa and the Middle East to realize that, once you have a sufficiently diverse population, there will always be some level of ethnic conflict. The greater the number of migrants a country brings in, the faster this change is imposed, the greater the cultural and ethnic difference between the existing population and the migrants, and the more such conflict you’re likely to get.

Luce fired back with a long tweet that encapsulates the reckless immigration errors of ostrich-policy neoliberal elites in the Anglosphere—the “far center” as I think of them. So I’ve decided to respond to some of them here. Here’s his reply in full:

I am grateful to Luce for prompting me to contact some experts in academia to help sift through the data. It’s pretty revealing! There are many errors in what Luce says. Sifting through is difficult, and much of this data is kept out of the “general narrative” promoted by the mainstream media. In any case, I’m going to focus on just three of his false claims that particularly stood out.

1. “There is no statistical basis to say (immigrant groups) are likelier to commit violent crime”

In Europe, this is clearly false. Let’s start with the UK itself, where a wave of imported violent crime and immigrant riots provided the backdrop to the public’s outrage over the Southport stabbings.

When it comes to arrests, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides a detailed ethnic breakdown. The White British arrest rate as of 2023 is 9.2 per 1,000. This means that 11 out of 19 ethnic groups have higher arrest rates than the native population. By comparison, the largest Muslim group, Pakistanis have an arrest rate of 11.3, while other Asians excluding Bangladeshis have an arrest rate of 13.5. The Black population meanwhile has an arrest rate of 20.4 per 1,000, which is more than twice the White British rate.

The gap is even more evident when we look at the detailed ethnic breakdown of individuals dealt with by the criminal justice system for the most serious so-called “indictable” offenses. Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Arabs—the three main Muslim groups—make up 4.4% of the population and 4.7% of those dealt with for the most serious offenses, using data from March 2021 to March 2023. (Do not be fooled by the linked article’s title: read on.) Blacks, meanwhile, make up 4% of the general population yet accounted for a striking 14.1% of those dealt with for the most serious offenses overall and 18% of those convicted of the gravest: homicide (see table 33 of the hyperlinked data).

The overrepresentation of Black Britons in violent crime is especially evident in London, for which we have additional data from a mayoral task force on knife crime. In an eerie echo of US data, Black Londoners are 13% of the city’s population but account for 61% of knife crime, 59% of robberies, 67% of gun crime, 54% of street crime, and 32% of sex offenses.

It is also worth noting that killings perpetrated by non-White British groups are more likely to occur in the street, whereas homicides perpetrated by Whites are more often committed in domestic settings. This means that migrant homicides are perceived—accurately—as having made Britain’s public sphere less safe, a phenomenon most vividly evident in a spree of urban stabbings:

Perhaps most strikingly, immigrant populations also disproportionately sexually exploit girls in grooming gangs. Research revealed that, between 1997–2017, 83% of group child sexual exploitation (CSE) prosecutions were of suspects of Muslim descent. Given their population share during this period ranged from about 3% to 6%, this means that British Muslims were extremely over-represented compared to non-Muslims for group CSE:

As for asylum seekers, whose numbers have exploded in recent years amidst a surge in small-boat crossings of the English Channel, data is harder to come by, but a 2013 study found that they commit crimes at four times the rate of the general British population:

It is sometimes claimed that we cannot rely on arrest data regarding ethnic disparities because they reflect systemic racism in the police. The Economist chimed in with a response to Elon Musk in this vein: “The claim that the criminal justice system is generally biased against white people is baseless. It is black Britons, not white ones, who are most likely to be victims of discriminatory policing: in 2021 to 2022 they were 2.4 times more likely to be arrested than white people and 3.5 times more likely to be victims of police violence”. But as has been pointed out elsewhere, this inference is based on “population norming”. If we norm by homicide perpetration instead, we see that Black people in the UK are relatively under-policed compared to their share of those who commit the most serious offenses. Meanwhile, the police overuse force on whites and people of unknown racial backgrounds, as you can see from the purple bars below:

Nonetheless, it would be helpful to have better data on migration and crime. Tory MPs brought forward a proposal in the dying days of the last government that would have required Ministers to present a report each year detailing the nationality, visa status, and asylum status of every offender convicted in England and Wales over the previous 12 months. This was an excellent idea that unfortunately went nowhere. But based on the available evidence, Luce is clearly wrong: overall, African and Islamic immigration has increased crime rates in Britain in comparison to the native white British population. Perhaps, he could report on why Britain and other European governments fail to deliver on the most basic task of governing: data gathering. If those governments were to provide the public with annual reports of the necessary data there would be no need for Twitter spats. The same is true elsewhere in Europe. In most countries, first-generation migrants are overrepresented in the prison population compared to their population share:

If we dig deeper into the data, we find striking results. Here is data from Denmark showing the violent crime rate expressed as a multiple of the native Danish conviction rate adjusted for demographic factors. The picture that emerges is that migrants from MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan) countries commit violent crime at a far higher rate than the native Danish population:

Disturbingly, second-generation non-Western immigrants have a higher crime rate than their parents. By contrast, the descendants of Western immigrants have a lower crime rate than both their parents and the natives:

A similar picture emerges in Sweden, which accepted the highest proportion of non-Western refugees and immigrants in Europe during the 2015 migrant crisis. In 2021, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention found that foreign-born immigrants were suspects of crimes against life health (i.e. violence) at 3.3 times the rate of native Swedes. They were also suspects of crimes of sexual offenses at 2.9 times the native rate. The multiples are even worse for their descendants, who were suspects of violent crime at 3.9 times the native Swedish rate, and of sexual offenses at a multiple of 2.9. The multiples for other offenses involving theft, fraud, and narcotics are bigger still, as you can see below:

In addition to soaring grenade attacks, Sweden has also seen the biggest increase in fatal shootings in Europe since 2015, leaping from one of the lowest rates of gun violence on the Continent to one of the highest in under a decade. An investigation showed that only 15% of that gun crime is committed by ethnic Swedes (shown in gray below), whereas 41% of it is committed by those who are foreign born (bright red), 35% by those who are native born to two foreign parents (dark red), and another 9% to the domestic born with one foreign-born parent (black). Of those foreign-born perpetrators, 62% come from the Middle East or the Horn of Africa.

The rise of serious crime in Sweden is principally related to the growth in organized crime. About 8 in 10 firearm-related homicides are directly tied to such criminal outfits. A recent study found that as many as 85% of street gang members and 94% of organized-crime syndicates have a first- or second-generation immigration background, as you can see below:

Sweden has also experienced a rape epidemic since 2015. However, a study found that even prior to the migrant crisis of that year, 60% of rapists were of an immigrant background, with half being born outside of Sweden. As the charts below demonstrate, African-originated immigrants are much more likely to commit rape (top chart) than native Swedes. MENAPT migrants, by contrast, are more likely to commit “assault rape” (bottom chart). Overall, men of non-European origin commit 84% of assault rapes despite making up only around 10% of the population:

A study into crime rates in Finland and Norway found a similar correlation, with migrants from Africa and Middle Eastern countries committing crimes at a significantly higher rate than native, Western, and some Asian populations, as you can see in the graph below. A Finnish study from 2021 also found that, in 2020, first-generation migrants accounted for 37.5% of rapes and 17.8% of child abusers despite constituting only 7% of their population.

Germany is also finding out the price of high levels of immigration from the world’s most dangerous places. Data from the German police for 2023 shows that despite constituting 18.4% of the population, non-citizens account for 41.1% of all criminal suspects, as you can see in the table below. For many of the most serious violent offences, the proportion was even higher: they were the suspects in 43.1% of murders, 74.5% of robberies including murder, 44.4% of manslaughter cases, 46% of aggravated rapes, 59.5% of forced prostitution, and 66.7% of serious bank robberies. Moreover, these figures do not even include those migrants who have gained German citizenship or those of migrant heritage. If you were to separate them out from the native German figure, given that (like Sweden and Denmark) the country has a major issue with generational crime among immigrant populations from MENAPT countries in particular, the disproportionate rate of migrant crime would be even more striking.

With respect to asylum seekers in Germany in particular, data from the BBC revealed that, as of 2017, they constituted 2% of the population yet accounted for 10.4% of murder suspects and 11.9% of those suspected of sexual offenses:

And in Italy, official data show that migrants account for 8.45% of the overall population but constitute 31% of the prison population. As of 2021, they committed 20% of homicides, 39% of sexual assaults, and 52% of robberies. Among minors, non-EU-origin minors commit 65% of the muggings in their age group, 50.2% of the thefts, 48% of the robberies, and 47.7% of sexual assaults.

So Edward Luce is just flat-out wrong on this one. Far from being driven into an irrational frenzy by online misinformation or mere racism stirred up by the “far right”, public apprehension that mass immigration from non-Western countries is making Europe less safe is well grounded in statistical reality.

2. “The idea that Musk is giving a voice to the voiceless is spectacularly wrong”

Luce’s other errors can be dealt with swiftly.

Contrary to what he says, the polling data make very clear that Musk is giving voice to the opinions of a large proportion of the British public, no matter how much the Financial Times wishes it were otherwise.

This fact pertains especially to the role of mass immigration in driving unrest. According to YouGov, 66% of Brits believe that the current rate of immigration is too high. As you can see below, this attitude is longstanding:

A large majority of voters, across all major parties, agree that “immigration policy in recent years” bears responsibility for the riots, including 62% of Labour voters, 56% of Liberal Democrats, 78% of Conservatives, and 95% of Reform voters.

And nearly six in ten Brits voice sympathy with the people who peacefully participated in the protests following the stabbing of multiple children in Southport in late July, rising to nearly two-thirds of Conservatives and 83% of Reform voters. This suggests that while most ordinary people reject violence, the protests have nonetheless struck a chord.

Most disturbingly, a survey conducted by polling firm WeThink has detected an apparent breakdown of public trust in democratic institutions to address the demands of the public and an increasing willingness to back violent alternatives. The poll, which was conducted on August 7–8 during the height of the recent disturbances, found that 39% of respondents agreed that “violence is sometimes the only means that citizens have to get the attention of British politicians” regarding refugees. 34% felt attacks on refugee accommodations are “sometimes necessary to make it clear to politicians that we have a refugee problem”, and that 36% felt that “xenophobic acts of violence are defensible if they result in fewer refugees being settled in your town”. Overall, 54% of those surveyed felt that the immigration policies from Westminster were the main cause of the riots. The results are displayed below:

Let me be clear: xenophobic acts of violence are immoral. But the growing public willingness to entertain it has the same root cause as the higher rates of violent crime committed by the immigrants themselves. And when we’re assessing the costs and benefits of Luce’s preferred approach, which seems to be to ignore the public entirely and to pretend that only “nutjobs” and “racists” oppose extremely high levels of non-Western immigration, the risk of additional far-right violence has to be considered. That risk constitutes another cost of taking a recklessly anti-democratic approach to migration.

Just how serially fraudulent British politicians have been on this issue in recent decades is evident in the chart below, which shows the mismatch between the manifesto promises on which they were elected and what they have actually done instead. If it were brought entirely up to date, you’d see the level of net immigration double at the end of the series to almost 800,000 in 2022, despite repeated Tory promises to cut it to the “tens of thousands”:

Musk is therefore correct to say that politicians must bear some blame for the riots rather than falling back on far-right scapegoats and online censorship. And as the polling makes clear, most of the population agrees with him about that.

3. “Trump – and his ally Musk – gave the game away when he torpedoed Senator Lankford’s bipartisan (border) bill”

The final delusional assumption I want to address is that the leftist political establishment is trying in good faith to control our borders but has been thwarted by opportunistic populists who want to keep them open for partisan advantage. This assumption is both naïve and incorrect. The specific example he gives is about the US border bill, so let’s start with what Biden and Harris have actually done to the US border, which is to unleash the biggest surge in illegal immigration in American history by weakening enforcement and strengthening incentives for unauthorized entry:

This hardly looks like an administration trying to control the borders. But according to Luce, all would have been well if only Republicans hadn’t voted down the Senate border bill this February. In reality, as I explained in my very first post here at Restoration, “The Democrats’ plan was to work with establishment Republicans to concoct a weak immigration deal shaped mostly by their own priorities. They would pretend that it would solve the border crisis, and either have the GOP co-own the immigration disaster (if it passed) or have their media allies claim that it would have solved the issue had ‘MAGA Republicans’ not rejected it.” And that’s exactly what Luce has now done!

In June, we saw positive proof that the administration already had the legal powers it needed to bring down the numbers—the exact same powers that Trump had used so effectively in his first term. Faced with polls showing immigration to be the public’s main concern ahead of November, Biden belatedly took executive action under long-established provisions of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act to bring down illegal crossings by 40%. I cannot emphasize enough: he could have done that all along. His last-minute U-turn to use existing authorities to partially secure a border he collapsed in the first place was a masterclass of pure cynicism ahead of an election he was losing, not responsible statesmanship.

The Fatal Flaws of Far Centrism 

The Far Centrists who dominate publications like the Financial Times and The Economist have done much to drive the insanity of Anglosphere immigration policy in recent years. They have three fatal flaws, all of which are on full display in Edward Luce’s tweets.

First, they talk a lot about the sanctity of democracy, but believe it should never apply to immigration policy. As I explained at length in my post on the fundamental moral argument against open borders, this stance is hopelessly incoherent. Since immigration involves changing the voters and lowering social trust, you can have either a sustainable democracy or mass migration without consent—but not both.

Second, they pose as sober empiricists who always “trust the experts”, supposedly in contrast to hot-headed populists and their gullible voters. In practice, however, their views about the costs and benefits of different types of immigration are largely based on unsupported dogmas, social desirability, and wishful thinking. I’ve shown at length that this is true of Luce’s claim about the impact of immigration on European crime rates. In subsequent posts I’ll explain how it applies to its effects on much else besides, from public finances to domestic fertility, and how a much more skeptical, data-driven approach is required.

Finally, they claim to be defenders of liberalism—Luce even wrote a book on it—but in reality they’ve surrendered it to wokeness for the sake of forced diversity. Their surrender is evident across the moral landscape. Social-media censorship suppresses public dissent about the costs of migration: “misinformation”. Meritocratic standards and equal treatment fall to buoy groups with lower competitive performance: “equity”. Freedom of speech is being rolled back by hate speech laws: “inclusivity”.  And the rule of law itself is being brought into disrepute by selective prosecutions and uneven police treatment for the sake of pacifying “diverse communities”.

A government response to the riots shaped by these tendencies represents a far greater problem than do the few individuals who participated in violent unrest. It makes it all but inevitable that ethnic conflict, declining institutional legitimacy, and mounting censorship will become integral features of the new Western way of life. If this degeneration of Western liberalism into authoritarian multiculturalism is to be avoided, the government needs to bring migration down to a level and composition the public accepts, and soon.