In June 2025, a small British think tank asked a question any voter should be allowed to ask. How many people were convicted of rape and murder in England and Wales over seven years, and what nationality were they? The Ministry of Justice had the answer in the Police National Computer, but it refused to hand it over because of privacy. Then the information commissioner looked at the refusal and ordered the figures released, but the British government hired lawyers to keep them secret anyway.
That fight is still going. It is the closest thing Britain has to an official admission that the most sensitive crime numbers in the country are too dangerous to print.
Canada never even fought, because Canada never built a system to collect the data. There is no public table that tells you whether the man convicted of rape was a citizen, a student, an asylum claimant, or a visitor, or what country issued his passport. A variety of Canada’s agencies each hold a piece, but none of them will assemble the picture. So the public gets headlines about “random” attacks, record study permit crimes, and a rise in recorded sexual assault and extortion — but no ledger that connects the arrivals to the offences.
This investigative article is about that missing ledger. It is about the years after 2014, when both countries changed who they let in, and a Canadian student-visa system was used as a door by India-based extortion networks. It is about why Ottawa would rather not count offenders by status, why London would rather go to court than publish rape-by-nationality, and what a country that still intends to choose its people does with a government that will not show its work.
London built the file. Then it buried it.
The request landed at the Ministry of Justice in June of 2025 from the Centre for Migration Control, a restrictionist think tank, under the Freedom of Information Act—and it asked for a document the department already sits on: the total number of convictions in England and Wales from 2018 to 2024, broken down by the offender’s nationality and by specific offences — rape, murder, child sexual offences — The MoJ refused and on June 22, 2026, after more than a year of stalling, the Information Commissioner’s Office rejected the MOJ’s excuses, and ordered the figures released. David Lammy, then justice secretary, sanctioned the appeal to the First-tier Tribunal and Alex Norris inherited the brief and left the lawyers running. A department that believed the cells were dull would have dumped the spreadsheet and gone to lunch.
What Britain will publish is the polite version. Foreign nationals are about one in eight prisoners—they have accounted for roughly one in seven sexual-offence convictions in leaked and earlier FOI cuts—and some nationalities are over-represented in rape and sexual assault in the fragments that have already escaped. But the fight is over the fine grain that would turn those fragments into a country-by-country ledger.
Ottawa never built the equivalent
Statistics Canada will give you racialized homicide categories and Indigenous identity—but it will not give a standing series of accused and convicted persons by citizenship and immigration status for sexual assault or any crime. Police enter the name into a database; the CBSA takes a visa, and the courts issue the conviction. The state that can find a student to remove for extortion can find a nationality field for overall crime, but It has chosen not to industrialize the data.
No tribunal is required when you simply never commission the table. That is the Canadian method: keep the pieces in separate buildings and call the gap a technicality.
The years they hope you will not put on the same page
Canada’s Crime Severity Index bottomed at 66.9 in 2014, peaked at 81.3 in 2023, and was still 75.0 in 2025. The violent index went from the low 70s in the mid-2010s to 101, and then 97.2. Police-recorded level-1 sexual assault is higher than a decade earlier, extortions have multiplied, and Police-reported trafficking incidents rose from around 200 a year to more than 600.
Britain’s victim survey is not a photocopy of Canada’s police trend but what the two countries share is the other line: after 2014 the source mix and the temporary-resident machine changed; after 2021 the student, asylum, and humanitarian pipes opened wider and the political class treated country of origin as a hate fact.
India became Canada’s dominant source of permanent residents and a crushing share of study permits. Permanent admissions from India went from the low tens of thousands to six figures overnight and Britain’s net migration peaked near 944,000 in early 2023.
Fentanyl, bail, recording rules, COVID, and a housing shortage all moved in the same window. Housing is not metaphysical. Add a city’s worth of people faster than you build dwellings and rents move. None of those files erase the intake problem—they are why the withheld crime file matters more, not less. A government that changed the population and then refused to itemize offenders is asking to be believed on credit—a credit that has been in default for more than a decade.
The one extract Ottawa could not keep entirely indoors
FINTRAC, Peel, Surrey, Calgary, CBSA, and the RCMP have described the same machine. India-based networks — Bishnoi, Bambiha, and the crews around them — use study permits and work permits as the door. Young men with Indian passports, often listed as college students, do the local work: threats, shootings, and deposits. The removals have begun, but enforcement has been late to the party.
The CBSA assessment that reached Global News is the document the broadcast networks handled like a live wire. Indian study-permit holders: about 4,000 people charged with 17,929 offences from 2019 to 2023. More than 13,000 charges in 2024. India is the top source country among foreign students charged. The 8,800 percent figure is a tiny base meeting a gigantic programme. Even the coverage written to shrink the story put the 2024 charged cohort around one percent of Indian students that year, but one percent of a population that large, aimed at extortion and organized violence, is how a suburb gets occupied.
A serious country would have started gathering data the next morning for rape, homicide, robbery, and trafficking. Ottawa did not—and London is paying counsel to keep rape and murder out of the PDF.
What the old studies are doing in this argument
Papers that find first-generation arrivals offend less describe a different programme with smaller, more selected groups mashed into one blob. City-level regressions of foreign-born share on crime rates are built to miss a high-rate tail inside a large intake. Wave those PDFs over Brampton in 2026, and you are doing public relations, not measurement.
Victim surveys complicate the crudest version of the argument: in 2025, Canadian-born women reported higher rates of sexual assault in the previous year than women born abroad. That finding is not a substitute for offender tables. A survey of who was attacked is not a count of who was charged, and police-recorded sexual assault has been inflated for years by changes in how forces log and reclassify complaints. None of that erases the other fact, but a subset of incoming men is already visible in the rape, gang, and extortion cases the state still refuses to itemize by status and nationality.
The crime file Ottawa never built is how those limits get frozen in place. As long as there is no annual ledger, every academic average from 1998 and every survey of victims can be thrown at anyone asking about accused men.
Why the file stays unbuilt, and why the built one stays locked
Privacy law is real. So is the political interest. So A cabinet that wants high inflows cannot survive a clean table in which a short list of source countries accounts for a grotesque share of rape and homicide relative to headcount. It cannot survive a table that shows student and asylum status over-represented in organized violence, and it cannot survive the comparison with the Europeans who already publish origin. So Ottawa never commissions the series, and London takes the series to a court to protect their interests.
“Community tensions” is the phrase used when the voters are the problem, and after the British grooming-gang record is a bet that girls are cheaper than a headline about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or the student-permit stamp—and Canada is running that same bet with a college letterhead.
A serious country chooses who enters, removes who offends, and shuts the streams that have already demonstrated they import predation and clan enforcement. The existence of a non-offender on the same flight does not cancel the crew that used the same airport.
What would end the argument?
What would end the argument is one product: charges and convictions listed by citizenship and by immigration status at the time of the offence, broken down to rape, murder, grievous bodily harm, child sexual offences, robbery, trafficking, and extortion, for each year, with age and sex attached, and with population denominators that are not a press officer’s invention, or better yet how about Remigration?
The crime file Ottawa never built, and London will not release, is the instrumentation of an experiment conducted on the public. Correlation plus a documented visa pipeline plus a locked cabinet is already enough to demand action. A nation that intends to remain one does not wait politely for the next appeal date. It prints the nationalities, ends the inflows that required the secrecy, and removes the people who should not have been here in the first place.