In 1952 Denmark was the first country in the world to ratify the Geneva Convention on the Rights of Refugees, a United Nations international treaty founded on the principles of protection and non-refoulement. Today, however, Denmark is taken as an example by conservative parties throughout Europe for its very restrictive policies on migration: a policy first implemented by the right and continued with continuity also by the Social Democrats in government.
The Social Democrats, a historic Danish center-left party, returned to government after the 2019 elections. And for the first time in years, that year’s electoral campaign had not focused on the issue of immigration because most of the parties were from done in agreement with the very severe and discriminatory measures against migrants imposed in recent years by the centre-right in agreement with the centre-left which, once in government, had carried them out continuously.
In 2022, due to an internal crisis in the government coalition, there were early elections, won with a very thin majority by the Social Democrats who, for the first time since the end of the 1970s, had formed a government with the Liberal party, center-right and their historic rivals, and with the Moderates, a party founded a few months before the vote by centre-right former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
Social Democrat discourse on managing immigration and integrating second-generation Danes into society had begun to shift to the right in 2015, in the face of a significant flow of migrants arriving in Denmark from North Africa and the Middle East. To justify this shift, the centre-left did not use identity or religious arguments, but arguments that historically belong to the left, such as the need to defend workers and the most vulnerable sections of the population (understood as the Danish population).
In one of his books, Frederiksen justified his stance thus: «It is increasingly clear to me how the price of globalization without rules, mass immigration and freedom of movement of workers is paid by the poorest classes» .
However, identity arguments are the basis of some of the most severe and discriminatory laws against migrants in Europe and which the Social Democrats have in some cases voted together with the right and in others proposed directly. They helped pass the law that allows you to confiscate jewelery from asylum seekers in Denmark, and the law that prohibits the wearing of the burqa and niqab. They abstained, instead of voting against, on the law that obliges applicants for citizenship to shake the hand of a public official (a law designed to embarrass more traditionalist Muslims) and on a plan to send all regular migrants who it is not possible to eject onto an island about two and a half kilometers off the coast, less than a square kilometer in size and once used as a laboratory for animal infectious diseases.
The island of Lindholm where the government would like to bring about a hundred migrants (Photo by Lindholm Veterinære Instituts)
According to the new immigration paradigm promoted by far-right parties and also shared by the Danish centre-left, migrants, but refugees in particular, do not have the desire to integrate, but to return to their country of origin as soon as possible.
In 2022 refugee status was granted to 1,400 people, up from 6,200 in 2001. The government claims that the rate of voluntary, and economically incentivized, repatriation is now 94 percent. However, the figure is not verifiable, and should be taken with extreme caution, according to Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and an expert on immigration law who spoke to Le Monde. There is no evidence that people who leave Denmark return to their country of origin, on the contrary: an increasing proportion return to other European countries.
Over time, Denmark has passed various laws to discourage the arrival of migrants: it has introduced, among other things, a new type of test to obtain citizenship, much more difficult to pass than the previous one, it has made the criterion for family reunification and much easier the revocation of the residence permit, which has involved, for example, several hundred Syrian men and women since 2019.
It has also made the conditions for accessing citizenship more difficult, subject to a very long list of requirements. To obtain it, it takes on average no less than nineteen years after arrival in the territory. In the name of the fight against segregation, in 2018 the country finally adopted an “anti-ghetto” plan to regulate the lives of people who live in 25 areas of the country inhabited mainly by Muslims, with the aim of imposing their “assimilation” more than an integration into society.
The plan plans to reduce the number of low-income housing units in neighborhoods where first- and second-generation immigrants (15.4 percent of total residents) make up more than half of the population. By law, children in these neighborhoods are required to attend day care from the age of one, and the penalties for some crimes are twice as severe as elsewhere. Once in government, the Social Democrats simply replaced the word “ghetto” with the expression “parallel society”, keeping the project unchanged.
While this strategy has actually decreased arrivals, not all initiatives have been successful. In January, the government suspended its plans to deport hundreds of asylum seekers to Rwanda. Furthermore, so far no prisoners have been sent to Kosovo, where Denmark has proposed renting 300 places in prisons for foreigners convicted in their country.
If Denmark was able to establish such a strict system it is because in 1992 it negotiated specific derogations from the European Treaties on immigration: «This is also what makes it difficult to duplicate the Danish model, because it is based on the strategy of each for himself » explained Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen. Yet the Danish model is taken as an example by various governments or conservative parties in Europe.
In recent weeks, and while a new Asylum and Migration Pact is being negotiated in Europe, several delegations of politicians have visited the Danish government or praised its migration policies. They are mainly part of the conservative right, but not only. At the beginning of May, for example, it was the turn of the French government spokesman Olivier Véran to meet the Danish Minister for Immigration, Kaare Dybvad, a social democrat, and then Eric Ciotti, one of the more right-wing Republican exponents. Accompanied by several deputies from his party, Ciotti visited a Danish administrative detention center and a district involved in the “anti-ghetto” law, explaining that France should do the same as in Denmark.
Visit to a refugee reception center and a detention center. Through these structures, the Danes control immigration.
People who enter Danish territory are not left in the wild as is the case in France. pic.twitter.com/bDht9wZSba
— Eric Ciotti (@ECiotti) May 24, 2023
A month earlier, on April 25, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had received her Swedish counterpart, the conservative Ulf Kristersson, at the head of a coalition that depends on the support of the Sweden Democrats, a far-right formation, a direct descendant of the neo-Nazis Swedes which has a great influence on the action of the executive. In Sweden, the government explicitly says that Denmark has become a model for them in matters of migration.
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Even the Austrian right admires the Danish strategy. On May 26, Gerhard Karner, the conservative interior minister, met Kaare Dybvad in Vienna and said: “Denmark is very good at sending people back to their country of origin.” Alongside him, the Danish Minister for Immigration in turn spoke of Austria as his oldest partner “in this battle to change the European asylum system, which is dysfunctional”. And explaining that the current migratory flows “are not decided by democratically elected officials”, he added: “All centre-right or centre-left parties like ours should deal with the issue of immigration to be sure of maintaining control”.
