Research project The Demography of immigration and crime

The project aims at describing the immigration-crime link in order to establish new hypotheses about the specific way this link materializes. If we observe, for example, substantial differences between countries that are similar in political climate yet different in structural or even physical constraints, such knowledge may produce hypotheses about the nature of the link between immigration and crime that we would be little likely to come up with in the absence of comparative knowledge.

On top of that the project is unique in and of itself by the comparison of these five countries, which all have access to administrative register data on, for example, crime. This is the first time such a comparison is performed.

A key challenge to comparative studies concerns data availability and accessibility and this challenge is particularly demanding when it comes to administrative register data. The project will start by finding the lowest common denominator with respect to data availability and from there go ahead to make country comparisons. The Swedish group at the department of Criminology, Stockholm University, headed by Olof Bäckman, will take part in this initial effort and thereafter deliver results for an article and/or research report, which all project participants will write jointly. The Swedish group will use data already available to the group at Statistics Sweden’s online system for micro-data access (MONA). No individual level data will leave the MONA system.