Where does that notion of ‘refugees being criminal’ come from?

I recently watched a video in which a person who’s an expert on crime discusses whether criminality in Germany is increasing because of refugees. Since I‘ve heard about crime involving refugees in the news a lot, I checked out the video because I got curious. The video revealed that refugees are not necessarily more criminal than non-refugees.

I tried to do more research on this after that and I found more articles which cover the same topic. (An interesting thing I encountered while doing this: when you type “Kriminalität” into Google, the first suggestion is in fact “Kriminalität Flüchtlinge”.) One of them was this Zeit Online article.

So as you see, there are news which do talk about this — to many people probably surprising — data, but it is not discussed as often and insistently as “negative” news about refugees. At least that’s my subjective perception. Another reason why this “refugees are criminal” prejudice kind of stucks with people might be that bad news generally tend to catch people’s attention more than good news. You could even say that the media uses the fact that people show more interest in bad news and therefore provides its readers or viewers with these. And there’s another thing that many people seem to forget: refugees or not, when there are more people in Germany it automatically means there’ll be more crime too. But who cares about all the crimes that happen in cities like Frankfurt or Berlin on a regular basis when you can also present criminal refugees to your readers or viewers?

By seemingly focusing on negative examples of refugee behaviour, news trigger fear in the population. I’m not saying that the refugee crisis does not cause any problems and that this fear is unreasonable — that’s why it’s being referred to as the refugee “crisis” — but fear is being spread to the point where people feel the need to do such completely irrational things as burning down refugee shelters — not once, but multiple times. (But guess what? That won’t solve the problem either.) I believe that media is one of the causes for this. It does certainly not mean that we have to ignore negative examples of refugee behaviour, but I think the focus should be shifted. Which is probably impossible anyway. But what you can do is try to pay attention to both sides, positive and negative.