Foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as British citizens, according to the first analysis revealing the scale of crime by migrants.

Police made more than 9,000 arrests of foreign nationals for sexual offences in the first 10 months of last year in 41 of the 43 forces in England and Wales.

This represented a quarter (26.1 per cent) of the total estimated 35,000 sexual offence arrests, according to the first analysis of its kind by the Centre for Migration Control of data from police forces, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Foreigners were 3.5 times as likely to be arrested for sex offences as British suspects, based on a rate of nearly 165 arrests per 100,000 of the migrant population against 48 per 100,000 for Britons.

For all crimes, foreign nationals were arrested at twice the rate of British natives, accounting for 131,000 of the arrests from January to October 2024.

While foreigners make up nine per cent of the population, they accounted for 16.1 per cent of the total number of arrests according to the figures, released under freedom of information (FOI) laws.

The crime league table places Albanians as the nationality most likely to be arrested, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Algerians and Somalians. There were 48 nationalities with a higher arrest rate per 1,000 of their populations than British suspects.