Calling Danish-born citizens “foreigners” turns a crime table into a counterfeit passport.

The invention occurs when an origin category is relabelled as foreign nationality and a higher group conviction rate becomes a description of everyone inside the category. The table has supplied a comparison. The slogan supplies an identity and a suspicion.

The title’s counterfeit passport is a metaphor for that relabelling, not an allegation that Statistics Denmark forged documents. If “foreigners” means people without Danish citizenship, an ancestry table cannot answer the claim on its own. If the word instead means people deemed insufficiently Danish, the speaker needs to state that criterion rather than hide it inside a number.

First specify the numerator: people receiving recorded guilty decisions, not every offence committed. Statistics Denmark’s documentation distinguishes Penal Code offences, traffic offences and other special-law offences. Decisions can include fines as well as imprisonment. Persons may appear in several offence categories, so adding category totals can count the same person more than once. [3]

Then specify the denominator: which resident population, sex, ages and year? A count of convicted people is not a population rate. An index of 326 is not a finding that 326 per cent of a group committed crime. The same ministry report gives a raw annual Penal Code conviction proportion of 3.9 per cent for MENAPT-origin male descendants in 2025. That is unadjusted, unlike the index. [1]

Finally specify the comparison. “All men” includes the groups being compared; it does not mean “native men”. The benchmark must remain attached to the number. Otherwise a correct value can arrive in a false sentence.

The higher indices in the selected MENAPT groups are not erased by correcting the word “foreigners”. Victims need prevention and offenders need individual accountability. A critique of collective suspicion must include the recorded disparities rather than suggest the numbers were invented.

Age adjustment improves the comparison; it does not explain the remaining difference. The report’s separately adjusted socioeconomic indices cover all guilty decisions, including traffic and special-law offences. Those cannot be substituted for its age-adjusted Penal Code indices as though only one adjustment changed. [1] Nor does a remaining association identify nationality, ancestry or culture as the cause. That requires a separate causal investigation.

Conviction records are also not a census of every crime. Statistics Denmark notes that some decisions are not yet registered when the annual extract is taken, and that legislation and classification changes can affect comparisons over time. [4] Questions about reporting, detection, prosecution and social conditions deserve evidence; naming these possible mechanisms does not prove any one explains the disparity.

The records establish differences in recorded conviction measures for specified groups. The definitions establish who enters those groups. The selected chart includes values above and below the population benchmark; it cannot represent every immigrant origin or every offence.

A statistic can help identify where prevention should be investigated. It cannot establish that an unconvicted neighbour committed an offence. Nor can ancestry cancel citizenship. The claim becomes testable only when “foreigners”, “natives” and “more criminal” are replaced with the exact populations and outcomes being compared.

The task is to preserve both responsibilities: account for the disparity and refuse collective guilt. An explanation that loses either has stopped reading the record.