Discussing the impact of migration on the UK’s national security is “absolutely legitimate” after riots that followed a knife attack in Belfast, the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has said.
The attack was allegedly carried out by a 30-year-old Sudanese man who entered the UK in 2023 and was given refugee status.
Jonathan Hall KC told the BBC: “If you look at state threats and people who have been willing to act as proxies or carry out attacks on behalf of Iran… I’m interested in the question of whether or not foreign nationality, particularly recent migrants, is becoming more relevant to the overall national security picture.”
Hall said there is a “question” of whether “certain countries are more likely either to commit very serious offences, or particular offences, or to get involved with state threat activity”.
Here, The i Paper takes a look at the data.
How migration has increased
A total of 93,525 people claimed asylum in the UK in year to March 2026, according to the Home Office.
This was 12 per cent less than in the year to March 2025.
Although the number of people claiming asylum has fallen in the most recent year, it remains high compared with levels seen over the previous two decades.
The number of claims peaked at 110,051 in the year to September 2025, surpassing the previous spike of 103,081 in the year to December 2002.
Do foreign nationals commit more crimes?
Foreign nationals made up 13 per cent of convictions and 12.4 per cent of those in prison in England and Wales in 2024, according to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
That share appears to be roughly similar to the share of non-citizens as a proportion of the population aged 16 and up, which was estimated at 12 per cent in 2024.
However, the Migration Observatory said the 12 per cent estimate is from a survey that tends to undercount recent migrants and has not fully captured the unusually high levels of migration seen between 2021 and 2024. Its researchers Ben Brindle and Madeleine Sumption said the UK does not currently have “especially reliable” figures on the share of non-citizens in the population, due to problems with official data sources.
If controlled for age and sex, non-citizens are underrepresented in the prison population.
However, the figures vary depending on the type of offence.
There are more foreign nationals who are convicted or in prison for drug offences relative to Britons, but fewer for robbery or violence against the person.
There is no clear data available that breaks down whether asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes in the UK than migrants who enter the UK via other means, such as work visas.
The Ministry of Justice does not record offences by immigration status, so there is no official way to compare offending rates of asylum seekers with the wider population.
The category of “foreign nationals” includes not just asylum seekers but also recent arrivals, long-settled immigrants, students, health and care workers and dependents.
Are foreign criminals being removed from the UK?
Some 5,154 foreign national offenders were returned in the year to March 2025, according to the Home Office.
This includes people who are not citizens convicted of any criminal offence in the UK or any serious criminal offence abroad.
The number has increased by 21 per cent compared with the previous year and has more than doubled since March 2021, when Covid-19 restrictions were still in force.
However, returns of foreign national offenders remain lower than they were in 2016, when 6,437 were sent home, and in 2018, when the figure was 5,518, according to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
About half of those returned (49 per cent) are from the EU.
The most common countries foreign national offenders are returned to are Albania, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and Bulgaria.
Last August the Government added more countries to its “deport now, appeal later” scheme which allows for foreigners to commit crimes in the UK to be sent back to their home countries before they can appeal against the decision.
There are 23 countries on the list.
The Home Secretary at the time, Yvette Cooper, said offenders were able to remain in the UK “for months or even years” while their cases worked through the appeals system.
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