Refugees and crimes rates as an explosive topic

Headlines according to which refugees are responsible for a rise in Germany's crime rate appear regularly in the press. The debate escalated after statistics on sex offences in Bavaria were seized on by media outlets without any analysis of other relevant statistics that put the data in context. A look at the comment columns in Eastern European media illustrates how explosive the issue is outside Germany too.

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Magyar Demokrata (HU) /

Merkel's inaction is inexcusable

The pro-government Hungarian weekly Demokrata uses figures from the current crime statistics in Bavaria to make the case that Germany needs an upper limit for taking in refugees:

“It's frightening: in the first six months of 2017 the number of sexual assaults in Bavaria rose by 50 percent compared to the same period in 2016. Worse still: there was a 91 percent increase in the number of sex offenders among the migrants. ... Two cases in particular drew attention. A 28-year-old woman was raped by a migrant in a park in Munich and a 34-year-old women was attacked by a Nigerian while she was walking by the Simssee near Rosenheim. ... Merkel's failure to take action for so long is inexcusable. For this reason alone an upper limit on the number of refugees entering the country should have been introduced long ago!”

wPolityce.pl (PL) /

Germany fooling itself

The Germans refuse to acknowledge the danger posed by Islamists who often enter the country as refugees, the pro-government Polish news website wPolityce believes:

“How many young men who fought on the side of the Islamists in Syria are now living comfortably in Germany? No one knows, and no one's even asking. ... Immigration has no impact on terror, basta! According to recent data from the German Agency for the Protection of the Constitution there are 580 Islamists in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, including 150 Salafists. 45 of them are ready to use violence. The German state is helpless against them. ... So all it can do is seek refuge in the Stockholm syndrome: Islamism has nothing to do with Islam. Extremists are the exception, people who have let themselves be misled by a criminal ideology. You can live believing these things, but the question is: for how long?”