Migrants, Foreigners, Criminals and Victims

• In Event: Victimization and Urban Insecurity: European Perspectives

Abstract

Public debates use to relate migrants with crime. Their high representation among police detainees or prison inmates favours that discourse. But there is no/few public debate about how often migrants become victims of crime. It’s true that the issue of foreigners with high levels of victimisation is raised when we talk about tourism, but that has no link to migration. In 2011, after the end of the most massive immigration wave in Catalonia, when a lot of migrants had already brought their families with them and there was a well-established population of people from migrant ascent, we decided to explore the relationships between migrants and crime and victims. Results showed that, yes, there was a hiperrepresentation/overrepresentation of migrants among police detainees, but there was also a quite high percentage of victims that could be identified with nationalities related to migrant movements. We repeated the study with data from 2017 and the same tendency was confirmed. Now we have repeated the same study with date from 2023, trying to include more parameters that allow us to ground both correlations (about the first one, migrants as criminals, there is a wide literature that focus mainly on racial profile and high presence in public spaces, however there is much less research about the second one, migrants as victims of crime, further than those related directly to racism or discrimination, and foreign tourists as criminals or victims). Results provide us with new grounds to work with.

Author

• Francesc Guillén Lasierra, Department of Interior