Third world migrants have ‘greatly helped’ economies in Europe, and can help prevent violent extremism, according to World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Agenda Council on Migration chairman Dr. Khalid Koser MBE.

Speaking with Refugees Deeply, the executive director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF) said extremism and terrorism are “absolutely… a homegrown issue” that has nothing to do with immigration.

Koser claims that migration is not only beneficial to societies and economies but can also help ‘prevent’ violent extremism.

“If there is a link between violent extremism and migration, it is that violent extremism is driving people from their homes, not that people are coming to our shores to commit violent extremism.

“It’s so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said, but it does need to be said,” added Koser, who edits the Journal of Refugee Studies, and holds fellowships and professorships at a number of institutions including the United Nations University – Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology  (UNU-MERIT).

Contradicting his claim was a report published in August which found that refugees and asylum seekers have been involved in more than half of terror plots in Germany since the onset of the migrant crisis  —  including the deadly Berlin attack in which a Tunisian rammed a lorry into crowds at a Christmas market.

Asked about the national security dimension of illegal immigration, he contended that there is “no evidence that irregular migrants are any more inclined toward criminality or terrorism than nationals”.

“There’s no doubt that there are certain groups of irregular migrants in certain cities that are committing crimes, whether it’s pickpocketing or fraud or petty crime,” he acknowledged.

“But overall the data suggests that criminality, and absolutely extremism and terrorism, are a homegrown issue more than an imported issue.”

Complaining that too much attention is focused on “national security, terrorism, extremism and crime”, Koser argued that the migration debate should be shifted to prioritise “human security” concerns including the deaths of people in the process of trying to migrate illegally, and racism.

“It’s quite clear that the real security concern is that a large number of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees are facing human security challenges, whether because they’re fleeing persecution, dying in transit, or facing discrimination in their new country,” he said.

The MBE recipient said it was a “big mistake” to suggest “that because an important but small number of people have become foreign terrorist fighters, that immigration has failed in Europe.

“Integration in Europe has been immensely successful,” he insisted. “Millions upon millions of people have come to Europe and flourished and helped our economies greatly.”

A variety of datasets show that mass immigration from outside Europe is a net cost to nations’ treasuries, with non-EU migrants costing Britain £16 billion a year net, while across the continent they have more than double the unemployment rates of Europeans.

One field in which non-EU migrants do make an outsized contribution, data from across the continent suggests, is crime.

In France, estimates of the proportion of prisoners who are Muslim range between 40 to 50 per cent, in a country where the Muslim population is estimated to be eight to 10 per cent, while 20 per cent of high-security prison inmates are Muslim in Britain, where just five per cent of the population follow Islam.

Concluding the interview, Koser told Refugees Deeply that countries taking action to secure their borders is “the ultimate victory for terrorists”, asserting that “migration stands for all of the values that the global community has spent the past 100 years fighting for – tolerance, understanding, democracy, globalisation, and realising each other’s potential.

“The ultimate victory for terrorists is not killing people or blowing up a mosque, it’s about scaring us so much that we lose our decency and our basic values. If we react to migration as we are at the moment, then we’re handing victory to them,” he added.