Denmark’s greatest exports embody Ozempic, Carlsberg and Lego. But now, European leaders suppose it has one thing extra useful to promote: an immigration system robust and efficient sufficient to neuter the onerous proper and preserve mainstream events in energy.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has achieved what many center-left governments of current years have discovered unattainable: getting reelected. In an age when incumbents preserve getting hammered on the poll field, many in Europe need to the asylum insurance policies of Frederiksen’s Social Democrats – which gained elections in 2019, 2022, and, polls present, are on target to win once more in 2026 – as a mannequin to mimic.
Britain’s Labour government – which has been hounded by the populist Reform UK party over its wrestle to regulate illegal immigration – has been so impressed by the Danish mannequin that it despatched officers to learn how the system works.
Announcing a radical overhaul of Britain’s asylum system on Monday, Shabana Mahmood, the house secretary, mentioned whereas Britain had “held rigidly to the old model, other countries have tightened theirs.” She singled out Denmark as a poster little one.
The outdated mannequin referenced by Mahmood is a creature of Europe’s post-war milieu. The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 utilized solely to Europe and sought to settle wartime refugees – primarily Jews who survived the Holocaust, ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe and dissidents fleeing Soviet regimes. The treaty was expanded in 1967 to use universally, partly to atone for colonialism.
But the proliferation of battle and local weather disasters – coupled with low-cost journey, rising charges of literacy, and the convenience of on-line communication – has put immense pressure on the post-war structure of asylum. At the top of final yr, 123 million individuals worldwide have been forcibly displaced in keeping with the UN, up from about 44 million individuals in 2010. “Our asylum system was not designed to cope with this,” Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer mentioned bluntly Monday.
Britain is now poised to embark on a coverage route first charted by Denmark a decade in the past. In 2015, Europe acquired its most requests for asylum in a single yr since World War II, as civil wars in Syria and Libya helped spur round 1.3 million individuals to journey to the area, principally from the Middle East. When Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel famously mentioned “Wir schaffen das (We can do it)!” urging Germans to welcome in refugees, Denmark took a special method.
Under Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Frederiksen’s predecessor as prime minister who then led the center-right Venstre occasion, Denmark aimed to cut back the variety of asylum seekers, enhance integration, and swiftly deport those that arrived illegally.
Rasmussen, who’s now the overseas minister, first made refugee standing momentary, not everlasting. Before 2015, refugees may keep in Denmark for 5 years, after which their residence permits would routinely turn out to be everlasting. Now, residence permits final for just one or two years, and refugees should look forward to eight years earlier than they’ll apply for everlasting standing. Even then, it isn’t assured: Refugees should be fluent in Danish and have held a full-time job for a number of years.
Denmark has additionally made it more durable for refugees to be joined by members of the family. Both should be aged 24 and above and have handed a Danish language check. The refugee should not have claimed authorities advantages for the previous three years, they usually should additionally put up a monetary assure.
Michala Clante Bendixen, head of the refugee advisory group Refugees Welcome Denmark, mentioned eradicating the idea that refugee standing will turn out to be everlasting has been detrimental to integration.
“Attachment to the labor market, learning the language and understanding the society – these are very important things for successful integration,” Bendixen informed NCS. But she feared the tightened necessities had “set the bar too high” for a lot of new arrivals, discouraging some from attempting in any respect – notably older individuals with decrease ranges of training.
“It creates a feeling of hopelessness. I’ve met so many refugees who say, ‘No matter what we do, it’s never good enough. I have done everything they require of me, and still it’s not enough,’” she mentioned.
Denmark has additionally been criticized for its coverage on “ghettos” (now termed “parallel societies”), which permits the state to dump or demolish housing estates the place greater than 50% of residents are from “non-Western” backgrounds. Successive Danish governments had frightened about poor ranges of integration in sure neighborhoods. In 2004, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned of areas the place “the men are unemployed, the women are isolated, and the families speak only the language of their home country.”
A charitable interpretation of the “ghetto” regulation, launched in 2018, is that it helps integration by encouraging individuals from completely different backgrounds to stay collectively, not merely side-by-side. But not everyone seems to be satisfied. In February, a senior adviser to the EU’s high court docket mentioned the coverage quantities to discrimination primarily based on ethnic origin.
Other laws have additionally been criticized by human rights teams. Under the so-called “jewelry law,” authorities can seize belongings price over 10,000 Danish Krone (round $1,500) to assist cowl the price of asylum help. The measure was solely utilized 17 occasions over its first six years, however nonetheless has darkish historic resonances, with some drawing comparisons to confiscations of valuables by the Nazi regime.
Few dispute that Denmark’s insurance policies have achieved their acknowledged intention. In 2014, Denmark granted refugee standing to six,031 individuals. By 2019, that determine had dropped to 1,737.
While Denmark grants way more residence permits right now than it did 30 years in the past, the overwhelming majority of those go to college students and employees, not refugees. Of the 99,811 residence permits Denmark granted final yr, simply 859 went to asylum seekers – lower than 1%.
“Denmark in recent decades has shown that it is politically and practically feasible to transition to a system of overall higher migration, and more employment- and education-intensive immigration,” in keeping with a report final month from Bruegel, a Brussels-based financial suppose tank.
Over time, this has deterred refugees from looking for asylum in Denmark. Britain’s Home Office mentioned Denmark’s insurance policies had diminished asylum claims to a 40-year low and resulted within the removing of 95% of these whose claims are rejected. In 2024, there have been 4 new asylum claims per 10,000 individuals in Denmark, in comparison with 16 per 10,000 in Britain, and 20 per 20,000 for the European Union as an entire.
Although the Danish mannequin has gained the Social Democrats reward overseas, some are rising disillusioned at residence. In native elections Tuesday, Frederiksen’s occasion misplaced management of Copenhagen for the primary time in additional than a century. While a lot of the discontent is over the capital’s excessive housing prices, analysts say the occasion’s hardline stance on immigration has alienated its extra progressive city base.
Whether the Danish mannequin will be imported wholesale by different governments stays to be seen. Britain plans to quadruple the look forward to everlasting settlement from 5 years to twenty – for much longer than the eight-year look forward to refugees in Denmark. A refugee’s standing will probably be reviewed each two-and-a-half years; if their residence nation is deemed to have turn out to be secure throughout that point, they are going to be deported. Those looking for asylum may be stripped of belongings together with jewellery to cowl the prices of their lodging.
Bendixen warned the brand new 20-year path to everlasting settlement would destroy refugees’ sense of the long run and make them “feel like they are second class citizens forever.”
“Integration fails when you give young people the feeling that they don’t belong. That’s where you see gangs and crime and areas where people have their own rules. That’s because they don’t feel like they’re part of society. A rule like this would make (that feeling) much, much stronger,” she mentioned.
Many UK Labour Party politicians would agree. Although Starmer, like Frederiksen, insists {that a} extra stringent asylum system is suitable with the progressive values of compassion and tolerance, others say the proposals are needlessly merciless and won’t have the specified impact.
“Plans to leave refugees in a state of perpetual uncertainty about where and if they can rebuild their lives are not just performative cruelty, they are counterproductive to integration and the economy,” Stella Creasy, a Labour MP, mentioned Monday.
Alf Dubs, a Labour member of the House of Lords who got here to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939 fleeing the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, informed the BBC that he was “depressed” by Labour’s hardline flip, and referred to as the brand new measures “a shabby thing.”