@mattbee You seemed to want a rational discussion. If I was wrong about that then we probably aren’t going to get much out of this exchange. Assuming you were sincere though, here we go:
Asylum seekers in the system are like 0.001% of the population.
Agree, it's a low percentage (about 0.16%, not 0.001%). The thread is about that though, so clearly not off-topic. (Parallel: the % of people who are Catholic priests is tiny, the vast majority of Catholic priests are not sexual abusers. But that doesn’t make shutting down discussion of the issue was right, I think).
Also, if there is a very different offending rate between two populations then introducing a high-offending group can have a big effect (Parallel: by counting some men’s violent crime as women’s, we change the “women’s” rate a lot. So the question is: are there identifiable groups that have massively higher offending rates? If so, we should care about it, even if the group is relatively small, and regardless of our political allegiances. Agree?).
You've shared one graph that shows conviction rates by nationality in Denmark for other nationalities that are at most <10% of the norm, excluding all the other nationalities that are <0%.
I’m not clear what you mean about <10% and <0%. I believe “conviction rate” here means % of the relevant population that has a conviction for a certain type of crime, as ratio of the rate for Danes. Underlying data from the Statistics Denmark dataset I believe (https://www.statbank.dk/20338).
You could argue courts are more enthusiastic about convicting other nationalities.
Implausible that this explains the full difference, I think. The system would need to be hugely and yet very selectively biased. Massive pro-Japanese bias, vs Danes. Pro-Philippine but anti-Burmese. Pro-Chinese but ten times more pro-Japanese, etc. Structural factors like differential reporting rates or prejudice can explain some of this, but not plausibly all of it I think. Also why would the baseline assumption be that rates would be the same? My baseline assumption would be that rates would be different -- we know that some countries are much safer than others, for example, and we know that cultures differ too.
You've also shared an extraordinary specific graph about suspects for gang rapes in Germany. If the police suspect “Africans”… what relevance is that to who committed a crime? And how many gang rapes does Germany actually investigate?
Yes, it’s just one crime type. Your objection here seems to be: “well, if you take any group you’ll be able to cherry-pick some type of crime that they are 23x overrepresented in”. Possibly, but if that crime is gang-rape, I think that’s worth knowing. It would be better to have better data though. (On how many: about 800 a year, per Google. Too many I think).
Like - I suspect people who post irrelevant crime data on immigration are motivated by being racist as fuck. But that's not the same as proving it.
Like paedophile priests, the important question is “is it true?” not “is it taboo?”. Knowing the answer to the second doesn’t tell us the answer to the first.
Sexual violence happens in families & communities, by people who know their victim.
What’s the implication here? “We” don’t need to worry about it, so it’s not an issue? Or that asylum seekers don’t have family & communities? Or that sexual assault there wouldn’t matter? I don’t get your point.
You say there's no data that makes your case in the UK, ignoring all the boringly inconclusive data from the Migration Observatory. So uh yeah - you're the one trying to make the extraordinary claim, you need to make the argument.
We don’t publish granular data like this — when other countries who do publish such data show very stark pattens I think it’s sensible to want to know more, not to rely on the fact we don’t report as a reason for comfort. Immigrants as a whole are not a high-crime group, as far as we can tell. You seem to think it's an "extraordinary claim" that some groups within that would have higher rates, especially when those groups are disproportionately young men from troubled places. I don't think that is an extraordinary claim (it is what a standard sociological model of crime would predict, for example, if poverty and deprivation drive crime, where should you expect to find the highest crime rates?). But I'd rather have the data.