Multiple German state interior ministers from establishment parties, who for years denied the link between mass migration and increased crime, have now acknowledged the connection.
The Union ministers’ acknowledgments came early this week as Germany’s 16 federal states, one by one, continue to release their police crime statistics (PKS) for 2023—figures that reveal a precipitous rise in the proportion of non-German suspects compared to past years.
While presenting the Free State of Bavaria’s PKS at a press conference on Monday, March 18th, Interior Minister Joachim Hermann (CSU) spoke plainly and candidly, saying that the state’s crime surge is part of a larger “nationwide trend for which foreigners and immigrants are particularly responsible.” He added the authorities would not “accept the increase in crime” as the new normal.
The data supports Hermann’s statement. Of the state’s 266,390 criminal suspects, non-German citizens living in Bavaria lawfully—despite making up only 16% of the population—comprised 39.6% of suspects in 2023, up from 36.5% the year before. More shockingly, compared to the previous year, Bavaria in 2023 witnessed a 20.5% uptick in the total number of immigrants suspected of having committed crimes.
Meanwhile, violent crime in the state jumped by 4.7% in 2023. Of the persons suspected of violent crimes, 46.5% were non-German. The violent crime category includes murder, manslaughter, and contract killing; rape and sexual assault; robbery, predatory extortion, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and attacks on air and sea transport—among other offenses.
“The criminal statistics make it clear that uncontrolled immigration negatively impacts the security situation,” Hermann said, declaring that it is “particularly important to remove foreigners who are a danger to public safety from the country as soon as possible after they have served their sentences.”
Hermann’s comments echo sentiments that have been expressed by politicians from the antiglobalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) for a decade.
Commenting on the Bavarian interior minister’s admission, AfD Foreign Policy Spokesman Petr Bystron, who is number two on the party’s 2024 European election list, told The European Conservative:
The truth always comes out. The interior minister has finally admitted to a simple fact that the ruling globalist parties have tried to deny for years. But talk is cheap… Now, consequences must follow. The next step must be the massive remigration of these criminals.
North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous state, also recorded a drastic year-over-year spike in the proportion of migrant criminal suspects. Of the 480,000 suspects in 2023, 169,000—or 35%—did not have German passports, which represents a jump of 10% compared to the previous year. This means that migrants, who make up some 17.5% of the northwest state’s total population, were drastically overrepresented as criminal suspects.
When it comes to violent crimes and pickpocketing, non-Germans were even more disproportionately represented, comprising 41.6% and 80% of suspects respectively. The proportion of migrant suspects in violent crimes in North Rhine-Westphalia jumped 6% from last year.
“The numbers tell us that we haven’t done our homework when it comes to integration,” NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) said.
Like Bystron, AfD MEP Joachim Kuhs called attention to governments’ shift in messaging and added that the number of criminal suspects with migration backgrounds is much higher than the PKS figures show, telling The European Conservative:
Although for years, the data has consistently shown a clear link between migration and crime, this is the first time the government has admitted it. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that the proportion of migrants suspected of committing crimes is much higher if migrants from Islamic countries who have been in Germany for ten years and who have German citizenship were included in the statistics.
The same trend is observable in the PKS figures out of Lower Saxony, which registered a 15% year-over-year increase in the proportion of non-German criminal suspects.
