Immigrant selection and crime in Britain

Do less-selected groups have higher incarceration rates?

Written by Noah Carl.

The number of Albanians residing in British prisons was in the news last year. According to the latest figures, they comprise about 1.5% of all inmates, despite being only 0.05% of the population – which means they’re overrepresented by a factor of 30. And in fact, the British and Albanian governments recently made a deal under which hundreds of Albanian convicts will be sent home to serve out the rest of their sentences.

One Albanian who won’t be sent home is a man named Gjelosh Kolicaj. The Home Office had sought to deport him after he was jailed for smuggling £8 million of his gang’s profits out of the UK in suitcases. Yet British judges blocked Kolicaj’s deportation on the grounds that the Home Office had “failed to take sufficient account of his human rights”.

What could possibly account for such a large degree of overrepresentation? The answer of course is immigrant selection: a disproportionate number of the Albanians who’ve come to the UK in recent years have been criminals or people with a predisposition for crime.