Hilthart Pedersen Thank you for your contribution. I never implied that refugees are a pristine group of people, incapable of doing wrong. The precise thing about refugees is that they are not a special group of people — they are, most probably, just like any other group of people.

Do you have any reliable data (which the Daily Mail is not, as noted by Ian Angus) whether the average frequency of some crimes is larger among the refugee population, than among the non-refugee population? That would be something to worry about. The real data, as discussed by Die Welt based on real police documents, suggests quite the opposite.

Furthermore, I don’t argue in this essay that we should accept everyone that says they are refugees. There is a whole judicial process for that. Finally, I don’t want to underplay the seriousness of crimes committed by refugees — they are not, and should not, be above the law. What happened in Cologne was very serious and its perpetrators should be prosecuted with the full powers of the law. But to say that new applicants should be forbidden from applying because this happened is the same thing as saying that all Germans should be banned from from France and Spain because of Volker Eckert.