Simon Hunter
“SPANIARDS are fed up with being victims of assaults, machete attacks, robberies and rapes. Almost always at the hands of the same people; illegal immigrants that the PP party and the Socialist Party insist on bringing to Spain with a pernicious magnet effect that is only growing.”
Those were the words uttered by the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox Party, Santiago Abascal, after plans recently emerged to distribute illegal immigrants from the Canary Islands between regions on the mainland.
It became such a hot potato that Vox withdrew its support for the PP party in some of the coalition governments where it was propping up the administrations.
For the party itself however, it is nothing new, with Abascal and his band of extremist politicians long seeking to link immigration with higher crime rates.
But is there any truth to that claim?
According to the centre right newspaper El Mundo there is no connection at all, once the statistics are analysed.
After cross-referencing population data from the country’s National Statistics Institute (INE) with the Interior Ministry stats on jails and crime, the conclusions are clear: there is no direct link between the number of migrants and crime.
The newspaper went back 25 years to 1998 when the population of Spain was just under 40 million, with 637,085 – or about 1.6% – coming from abroad.
By 2023, there were six million foreign-born inhabitants, or around 13% of the 48 million people of Spain.
But crime rates have not grown in step with this ten-fold increase of foreigners, with the proportion of non-Spaniards locked up in prison holding steady.
In 1998, some 7,850 foreigners were locked up in jails, which was 18% of the total prison population, while foreigners accounted for 1.6% of the population.
That means that the percentage of foreign inmates was 11 times greater than the percentage of foreign residents in Spain.
Should that trend have continued, foreigners would now account for 142% of the prison population – an impossible statistic, as the newspaper points out.
Instead, a different trend has emerged.
By 2009, the percentage of foreign inmates had reached 36%, with a total of 27,162 non-Spaniards locked up.
Since then this statistic has more or less held steady, with the figure for 2023 coming in at 31%.
In fact, as the migrant population in Spain continues to grow, the statistics have actually improved.
If in 2023 migrants accounted for 31% of the prison population, they also made up 13% of the total population in Spain; the multiple between these two figures is just 2.45, or basically, a historic low.
It emerges that this multiple has been steadily falling since 1998.
Another key conclusion from El Mundo relates to the nationalities of migrants.
This year, for example, has seen a spike in arrivals in the Canary Islands.
??Between January 1 and August 15 this year, 22,304 migrants reached the islands, compared with 9,864 in the same period in 2023 – an increase of 126 percent, according to Interior Ministry figures.
The phenomenon saw Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez make a three-day visit to West Africa, in a bid to address the root of the problem.
But it is not migrants that are arriving illegally from countries that Sanchez visited – Senegal, Mauritania and The Gambia – who are topping the tables for crimes and convictions.
The latest Interior Ministry figures show that only four countries have more than a thousand inmates in Spanish jails: Morocco (5,213), Colombia (1,634), Romania (1,301) and Algeria (1,170).
The next three on the list are Ecuador (584), Portugal (267) and Italy (264).
Alarmingly, despite the recently reported data, Vox is pushing ahead with its anti-immigration stance.
Vox deputy Jose Maria Figaredo asked the government during a debate in Congress last week about the cost to the taxpayer of ‘taking in 250,000 immigrants from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania’.
Shocked by this the Government minister for Migration Elma Saiz, slammed her for voicing what she called a ‘hoax’.
“It is not true that we are going to take in 250,000 people from Mauritania,” she insisted, adding she was ‘making absolutely despicable statements about the migrant population’.
She added it was in the ‘purest Trump style’. A fact clearly born out by the real statistics.
