MJOLNERPARKEN, ACCOMMODATION project in the multi-ethnic Norrebro district of Copenhagen, is nicely landscaped and dotted with sports fields. The only signs that something is wrong are banners hanging from white balconies with slogans like “I’ll never move.” By next fall, many of the 1,500 residents may have to do so. Indeed, the Danish government regards Mjolnerparken as a “parallel society”. Too many of its inhabitants are disadvantaged, unemployed, or poorly educated, or have criminal records and are of “non-Western” origin. To comply with his policy of dismantling what the government until recently called “ghettos”, the owner of Mjolnerparken will sell two of the four apartment buildings to investors. Other citizens will move in.
This is one of the many ways that Denmark tries to control where and how immigrants live. On December 1, his Social Democratic government promulgated a law to prevent the formation of parallel societies by obliging local authorities to give priority in “prevention zones” to educated and employed people when allocating housing. He is even more concerned with deterring migrants from arriving in the first place. In March, it was the first EU country to say he would send the Syrians back to Syria, arguing that Damascus and its surroundings are now safe. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has set herself a goal of “zero asylum seekers”. On December 13, a Danish court sentenced Inger Stoejberg, who was immigration minister in a previous center-right government, to 60 days in prison for illegally ordering married asylum seekers under the age of 18 to be housed separately from their spouse. She says the intention of the policy was to discourage child marriage. Anti-immigrant parties hail her as a martyr.
Denmark is not the only country to raise the drawbridge. Europe suffered political convulsions after an influx of refugees in 2015; most governments are keen to avoid duplication. But in some ways Denmark stands out. Unlike their Hungarian counterparts, say, its politicians do not denounce immigrants to distract from their own failures. Denmark differs from neighboring Sweden, which in 2015 received more Syrian asylum seekers as a proportion of its population than any other European country except Turkey. Sweden “cherishes multiculturalism,” says Tina Gudrun Jensen, anthropologist at the University of Malmö. “In Denmark, multiculturalism is really a negative word.
This approach gives the Danes bad press. “Denmark leads the race to the bottom” recently captioned a title. But for some governments, it is a model. Mattias Tesfaye, the Minister for Immigration and Integration, said recently that he had just received a delegation from Greece and that he was expecting one from Austria. Britain has reportedly spoken to Denmark of cooperating to process asylum claims in a remote place like Rwanda. Even Sweden looks more and more like its neighbor to the south.
The Danish difference has deep roots. After the Danish crown lost the largely German-speaking duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia in 1864, it learned the lesson that the country must “stand united. [and] be homogeneous, ”says Ulf Hedetoft, a specialist in nationalism at the University of Copenhagen. A law two years later stipulated that only people who spoke Danish and wore Danish clothes could become Danish. It is still difficult. MIPEX, an index that ranks countries according to how policies promote immigrant integration, ranks Denmark’s access to citizenship as “halfway favorable” 41, compared to “favorable” 83 in the Sweden.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Denmark recruited “guest workers”; refugees from Vietnam and Iran arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. Reception waned in the 1990s with the arrival of refugees from the war in what had once been Yugoslavia. The Danish Nationalist People’s Party (DF), founded in 1995, was agitating to shut the door on them. In 2001, he backed a Conservative-Liberal government, which crafted the current two-pronged strategy of pushing back potential migrants and reshaping those who settle.
His policies included lengthening immigrants ‘wait for permanent residence from three to seven years and ending the requirement for schools to teach in students’ mother tongues. To reinforce the Danish character, he introduced “canons” of culture, history and democracy into the school curriculum. Without such measures, “it would have been truly catastrophic,” says Peter Skaarup, the DFthe House leader of.
In Sweden, such feelings are spreading; in Denmark they are now conventional wisdom. “The social democratic welfare state can only survive if we control migration,” says Tesfaye, whose father was an Ethiopian refugee. Denmark may be the second happiest country in the world, according to a recent poll, but its happiness seems fragile.
Denmark’s defense of its welfare state is ruthless and, critics say, racist. In October, the Ministry of Finance, in its annual report on the matter, estimated that in 2018, immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net amount of 31 billion crowns (4.9 billion dollars), or about 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, on the other hand, contributed a net amount of SEK 7 billion (see graph). Data on the fiscal effects of immigration is what “changed the perspective of social democrats,” says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Social Science Research Center.
Muslims are at the heart of the problem. This year was the first time the ministry had done a separate report on contributions from people from 24 Muslim countries. They represent 50% of non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside this concern are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Tesfaye, but, “we can’t meet in the middle. It is not half Sharia and half Danish constitution.
To Muslim ears, it sounds like a bias. A law passed in 2018 aimed at conservative Muslims requires new citizens to shake the hand of a municipal official during naturalization ceremonies. Politicians “make you feel like you don’t have to celebrate Ramadan or Eid or whatever,” says Agob Yacoub, a Syrian refugee. Other groups are not subject to such pressures. Chinese immigrants have not become culturally Danish but are nonetheless “extremely welcome,” notes Hedetoft. The use of the treasury by Muslims probably has little to do with religion. More than half came as asylum seekers or for family reunification, compared to 30% of other non-Westerners.
Like its Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark enrolls new migrants in programs that include language classes and civic education. But its benefit system is characteristically a little more stringent. Payments are lower for people who have not lived in the country for seven out of eight years. This serves both to deter immigrants and to encourage those who settle to work. Denmark can boast that the unemployment gap between natives and non-European immigrants is smaller than that of Sweden. But this may be in part because Sweden has a higher effective minimum wage compared to its average wage, depriving many new immigrants of their jobs, especially if they do not speak Swedish well.
The justification for breaking up neighborhoods like Mjolnerparken seems fragile. Its shadow society status is based in part on the fact that 2.69% of its residents were convicted of criminal offenses a few years ago. The authorized limit is 2.35%. The number of young men involved in delinquency is “less and less each year”, estimates Majken Felle, a teacher who lives in one of the buildings put up for sale. Far from forming a parallel society, the Muslims of Mjolnerparken come from many countries and speak to each other in Danish; it is the mother tongue of the young generation.
The example of medical student Malak Tumeh is a rebuke to Danes who think Muslims do not belong, but should also give pause to those who think Denmark’s monoculturalism will inevitably alienate them. The daughter of an Iraqi mother and a Palestinian father, she arrived in Denmark in 2001 at the age of four months. Without a residence permit, his parents could not exercise their profession (his mother is a trained microbiologist, his father is a biochemist). He sold pizza and worked in construction to make ends meet. When Ms. Tumeh was six years old, the police searched her home for false passports; they “pulled” her by her bag, she said. Religious studies at school with a focus on Christianity.
Yet Denmark and the Tumeh have adapted to each other. The religion teachers “asked my parents to share their experiences with Islam,” Ms. Tumeh says. They brought a Quran to class. Ms Tumeh and her father eventually became permanent residents in 2020; her father was granted citizenship last year. Not yet a citizen herself, Ms. Tumeh considers herself Danish. “The past could have been easier, but it’s still a good life, better than a lot of people could imagine,” she says. It is not easy to become a New Dane. But for the few who do, the struggle is worth it. ■
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “No room at the hostel”
