In 2005, Spain lived the esterores of boom Real estate, mobile phones were to call, had not arrived Facebook, ruled José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and sounded Amarral on all radios. Then, Spain had, according to official INE population data, 44 million people, of which 3.7 million were of foreign nationality (8.5%). That same year, the crime rate was 49.4 criminal offenses per thousand inhabitants.
The same data from the same sources denies that Spain is today a more dangerous, more insecure and, much less, that that had to do with the arrival of migrants. In 2025 there are double residents with foreign nationality (7 of the 49 million today in the country, plus two million that were born outside, but have Spanish nationality). However, the crime rate has not risen with that multiplication of immigrants, on the contrary: 40.6 crimes per thousand inhabitants, the lowest band in the historical series, according to data from the first quarter of 2025 of the Interior Ministry. That is, while the number of foreigners who lives in the country raises, the crime rate is lowered (-2.8%, according to the most recent data), a rate that has experienced a descending tendency for decades with some ups and downs after the pandemic, attributed by interior to the explosion of cybercrime crimes.
However, the number of convictions between people of foreign nationality is greater than they would correspond to them By population weight (14.2% are foreigners and are 28% of convicted, according to the statistics of 2023, with special relevance of those born in America, Africa and closely followed by EU Europeans). So, do they commit more?
The experts consulted agree that it has nothing to do with being migrants. On the one hand, condemnation data are an indicator, but they are partial because they give little detailed information. In any case, “it is not the origin, they are the material conditions,” explains Andrea Ruiz, a doctor in Anthropology and director of the Begirune Foundation of the Basque Country, dedicated to social policies and migrations. “In fact, in general, studies show that it is the opposite.” In the case of economic migrations, “families select the most suitable member in the country of origin, who has more possibilities to adapt and get a job. In general, those who migrate want to stay and obtain citizenship, are not interested in crime because they know they can be expelled, they make no sense, they are usually people more respectful of the law, according to the conclusion of recent studies.”
The mantra of sexual crimes
When discriminating against crimes, the average is high in “crimes against heritage”, among which there are robberies and thefts, where 70% of the infractions were committed by citizens born in Spain and the rest were committed by foreigners, which also includes citizens of EU or US countries. However, in gender violence or sexual crimes – another of the mantras that agitated the ultras is that of “the security of our women” – there is an obvious majority of Spaniards among those convicted (for example, in sexual crimes, 406 convicted against 94, according to the INE).
“Of course there are foreign criminals, but the nationality variable that is collected in the statistics is equivocal,” explains Javier Guardiola, professor of criminal law and member of the University Institute for Research in Criminology at the University of Valencia, which deepens that these data include “from a Spaniard who lives outside and commits a crime here, to a foreigner who has been living here for 20 years.” Or abroad who has come by plane with drugs and, when he is arrested in Barajas, he counts in statistics as a foreigner who commits a crime of Spain, but does not live here, says Andrea Ruiz, who points out that the data also does not specify the repeat offenders.
This overrepresentation is also based on several factors, according to this expert: “There is an age factor, because among migrants the average age is younger (and it is the strip of greater violence). In addition, they have more poverty risk rate. They also stop them more in controls and records – a Latin has 3.5 times more likely to stop it, a black has six times more probabilities and a gypsy, 10–”. Ruiz also points to some media that whenever they talk about migration is in negative terms and the “imaginary” created in series and television, which contributes to the idea that foreigners (of some concrete races and nationalities) are more dangerous.
'Zombies' Data Resistant
This is what Rubén Rumbout calls “zombie ideas”, as the expert collects Elisa García Spain in an article about immigrant/offender link: “These ideas remain persistently in the popular imaginary. They are immortal and resistant to any objective data that contradicts them.” One of those ideas is that nothing is done with which we commit crimes or, even that they are given, as Vox says. Only in 2024, the Interior Ministry expelled 3,031 foreigners for different national security reasons (more than 8 average expulsions per day). In addition, article 89 of the Criminal Code plans to replace penalties for more than a year for the expulsion of the foreign person, including the one with residence permit, something that constantly happens in the Spanish judicial system.
“Linhes are made with foreigners as criminals, but what about foreigners as victims? Never cross that idea,” says Ruiz. According to the last Julio CISthe Spaniards consider immigration the fifth of the “problems” that affect them, behind economic matters, housing, health and unemployment. The overexposure for the case of Torre Pacheco, the ultras calls and the validation of the racist argument could raise this perception in the next barometer, sociologists point out.
Regarding racist attacks, the latest data available to the hate crimes report in Spain, prepared by the Ministry of Interior, also represents an alert: they rose 21% compared to the previous year. Among them, the crimes of hate for racism and xenophobia, with 856 facts, were the most numerous and represented 41.8% of total complaints.
The Pacheco Torre and many other cases “is something that has more to do with the race than with migration,” says the anti -racist journalist Moha Gerehou. “Eternal suspicion is generated and points to blacks, Moroccans … it is not against English or French population. There is usually a racial link,” he explains. The journalist also focuses on the weight that the media have had: “When the one who commits a crime is migrant, he puts himself in the headline or the news. When he is a Spanish target, he does not refer. And now it is already happening that in the progressive media they specify that he is not migrant, and this enters the game.”
Fear of being migrant
The Polvorín de Torre Pacheco is a clear example and there are racial attacks on businesses and neighbors from there although the aggressor of the 70 -year -old man, the case with which the spiral of violence began, was not from the town and is already detained. “The first consequence is fear, because the attack is very random. They take everything serious, ”Managou perceives.
“Hate crimes cost to prove because many times their commission or dissemination is through networks, where there is anonymity, companies are out of Spain and do not always collaborate. On the other hand, they need a subjective component, it must be proven that hate is encouraged or that is done to humiliate,” explains Susana Gisbert, prosecutor of hate crimes in the Valencian Community. It also denies a myth: “We see organized actions as in Torre Pacheco, but the general rule is that the authors of hate crimes are 'normal' people with all the quotes, who do not belong to any group, who think this and are legitimized by the networks or statements of politicians.”
“The image of the criminal migrant is easy to sell, it is alienity, but it does not sympathize with reality,” says the expert in law and criminology Javier Guardiola. You just have to look around any day or look at other equally reais examples, but totally positive, such as Moroccan gangs that made possible, working up to Christmas, solving the collapse of the public sewer network after the Dana de Valencia. It is the same general group to which today, ultra -right groups want to “hunt” and that has put police and civil guards alert in the town of Murcia.
Crime is a complex, changing, little profiled phenomenon and whose statistics include murders to an injury, drug trafficking, prevarication or cybesting (the crime that is growing most), experts explain, so it is risky to draw conclusions. “Simply, the foreign binomial/crime is not real.” Even so, parties such as Vox flirt with the idea, as well as Isabel Díaz Ayuso with her Paccia de Alcalá in 2024, the independentistas of Aliança Catalan or Feijóo himself, who specified a few months ago about the immigration that people have the right to live “with certainty”, contrasting two ideas that, in accordance with the crime and foreign population data in Spain, are not opposed.
