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OPINION: Stop being so hostile to foreign professionals, Denmark. You need us

A work force shortage has been one of the biggest potential obstacles to Denmark’s economy in recent years. But the government's harsh approach to permanent residency does not reflect the need to address the situation, guest columnist Naqeeb Khan writes.

Published: 27 March 2019 10:30 CET
OPINION: Stop being so hostile to foreign professionals, Denmark. You need us
File photo: Malte Kristiansen/Scanpix 2013

According to Kristian Weise, CEO of Cevea, “Denmark is facing demographic changes and we will be short of labour in near future. Since 2000 alone, the number of Danish nationals in the working age has decreased by 13.3 percent. Denmark therefore needs foreign labour to support the workforce.” 

The Confederation of Danish Industry (Dansk Industri, DI) surveyed 465 companies in Denmark and found that 60 percent were facing challenges in filling vacancies.

DI director Steen Nielsen noted that the Danish economy is growing and that for this to continue, companies must have access to the labour they need.

Companies are sometimes forced to refrain from bidding or are unable to deliver an order because they do not have enough employees, the DI director added.

Meanwhile, the Danish Society of Engineers (IDA) has expressed deep concerns over the shortage of professionals in the fields of engineering and natural science. Despite a higher number of university places, there will be still a deficit of around 10,000 people by 2025, DR reported.

Other sectors which could be affected by labour shortages include health and social care, the hotel and restaurant industry and cleaning and construction companies.

The so-called ‘paradigm shift’, a new which reflects the policy of preferring repatriation to integration of refugees, is another blow to the shortage of work force. Some 8,700 employed refugees face being sent home after the law was passed earlier this year, media Mandag Morgen reported.

Despite all these reports, the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party (DF), a parliamentary ally to the coalition government, has come up with a new proposal which will impact the country’s foreign work force. This time, the target is EU residents and highly professional and skilled labour.

The proposed bill is the third one in the parliament in last three years which has aimed to change rules on for changing permanent residency.

In January 2016, parliament passed a bill requiring six years of residency in Denmark for foreign (non-EU) nationals to be eligible for permanent residency.

In May 2017, another bill was passed, this time increasing the residency requirement to eight years. Both bills also saw other residency criteria also tightened.

The new bill, put forward by DF on March 12th, proposes that EU citizens will not be eligible to apply for permanent residency in Denmark until they have lived in the country for eight years, an increase from the existing five-year requirement.

Other tighter rules in the DF proposal include stricter requirements on language skills, and the abolition of a rule which enables expedited permanent residency if other certain conditions are fulfilled.

The proposed bill, B143, violates an EU directive (2004/38/EC), which holds that EU citizens who have resided legally for a continuous period of five years in the host member state have the right of permanent residency there.

According to 2017 figures from the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, 80 percent of foreign graduates from Danish universities leave Denmark within two years after completing their studies.

This is probably because of the uncertain nature of settling down in Denmark: a 2016 Aarhus University study found that immigration rules in Denmark are changed every three months.

Frequent changes and constantly tightening the requirements for permanent residency creates a basic sense of uncertainty and lack of predictability. It not only makes it difficult to live a normal life, but people who think they are on the right track towards getting permanent residency find that they face yet another new set of requirements.

A permanent residency permit provides internationals and their accompanying families the opportunity to start their own business, set up a firm, or start a university programme without having to worry about visa extension. This is crucial for peace of mind, without the worries of potentially being told to leave the country should you lose your job, become sick, get divorced, widowed or otherwise become unable to fulfil the strict income or employment requirements.

Foreign professionals who have been working hard to fulfil the stringent supplementary requirements for expedited permanent residency face having to wait up to four more years if the new bill is passed. EU citizens could be waiting three years longer than they expected to.

If rules for settlement and permanent residency are constantly changed, it will be harder for Danish employers to attract and retain skilled foreign staff. Danish employers will even struggle to retain Danish nationals with foreign spouses who do not meet requirements for family reunification.

This will only result in another upset to an already-challenged labour market in Denmark. The consequence of this is reduced economic growth in the country, shutting down firms and people educated by Danish taxpayers putting their skills to use elsewhere in the world. 

Danish politicians should think twice before Denmark loses elite foreign professionals.

READ ALSO: EU citizen? Here's how your free movement rights apply in Denmark

Naqeeb Khan is a research graduate of the University of Glasgow, Scotland and currently resides in Denmark. He is president of Green Human Resources and an executive member with the Danish Green Card Association (DGCA). He can be contacted via email.

Member comments

  1. It thought this was just me but its true. Their effort to keep people out of the country that is not ethnically danish is effecting people like me. I came here to study and wish to work but the constant changes keep effecting me negatively and i feel id rather go elsewhere take my skills then stay here. For no other reason but that i feel the danish government does not appreciate what i can offer here.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Down with Danish hygge – Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

Hygge, the Danish art of getting cosy, has taken the world by storm. But the Swedish equivalent is refreshingly different, says David Crouch 

Published: 20 December 2022 08:41 CET
Updated: 6 August 2023 11:03 CEST
OPINION: Down with Danish hygge - Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

It is around seven years since the Danish word hygge entered many of our languages. Hygge, pronounced hue-guh and generally translated as the art of cosiness, exploded almost overnight to become a global lifestyle phenomenon.

Hygge dovetailed with mindfulness and fed into other popular trends such as healthy eating, and even adult colouring books. “The Little Book of Hygge” became a publishing sensation and has been translated into 15 languages. It was swiftly followed by a second book from its author, “My Hygge Home”, one of dozens on the market. 

There is nothing wrong with new ways to relax, and certainly no harm in identifying them with Scandinavia. But as a guide to living your life, there are some problems with hygge. 

First, the original meaning of the word is too broad and subtle to enable a clear grasp of the concept among non-Danes. This probably helps to explain its appeal – hygge is an empty bottle into which you can pour whatever liquid you like.

Patrick Kingsley, who wrote a book about Denmark several years before the hygge hype, was “surprised to hear people describe all sorts of things” as hygge. Danes, he said, would use the word when talking about a bicycle, a table, or even an afternoon stroll. 

So it is hardly surprising that, outside Denmark, hygge is applied rather indiscriminately. Last week the New York Times devoted an entire article to achieving hygge while riding the city’s subway, of all places. “A train, after all, is basically a large sled that travels underground, in the dark,” it said, trying too hard to find a hint of Nordic-ness on the overcrowded railway.

READ ALSO: Danish word of the day – hyggeracisme

Hygge has become an exotic and mysterious word to describe more or less anything you want. It is as if someone decided that the English word “nice” had a magical meaning that contained the secret to true happiness, and then the whole non-English speaking world made great efforts to achieve the perfect feeling of “nice”. 

A second problem with hygge is that, in Denmark itself, it seems to operate like a badge of Danishness that can only be enjoyed by Danes themselves – a kind of cultural border that outsiders cannot cross. You can walk down a Danish street in the dark, one journalist was told, look through the windows and spot who is Danish and who is foreign just by whether their lighting is hygge or not.

When writer Helen Russell spent a year in Denmark, she was intrigued by hygge and asked a lifestyle coach about it. “It’s hard to explain, it’s just something that all Danes know about,” she was told. How could an immigrant to Denmark get properly hygge, Russell asked? “You can’t. It’s impossible,” was the unhelpful reply. It can’t be a coincidence that the far-right Danish Peoples Party has put a clear emphasis on hygge, as if immigration is a threat to hygge and therefore to Danish-ness itself. 

READ ALSO: It’s official – Hygge is now an English word

Outside Denmark, this exclusivity has taken on another aspect: where are all the children? Where amid the hygge hype are the bits of lego on the floor, the mess of discarded clothes, toys and half-eaten food, the bleeping iPads and noisy TVs? “Hygge is about a charmed existence in which children are sinisterly absent,” noted the design critic for the Financial Times. It’s as if the Pied Piper of hygge has spirited them away so you can get truly cosy. 

But there is a bigger problem with hygge. It is largely an invention, the work of some clever marketing executives. After spotting a feature about hygge on the BBC website, two of London’s biggest publishers realised this was “a perfect distillation of popular lifestyle obsessions”. They set out to find people who could write books for them on the subject, and so two bestsellers were born, spawning a host of imitations. 

Sweden has a different word that means roughly the same thing: mys (the noun) and mysig (the adjective). There have even been some half-hearted attempts to sell mys to a foreign audience in the same way as hygge. But the real meaning of mys in Swedish society is rather different, it seems to me. The reason for this, I think, is that mys has become so firmly identified with Friday nights, or fredagsmys – the “Friday cosy”. 

Fredagsmys is a collective sigh of relief that the working / school week is over, and now it is time for the whole family to come together in front of some trashy TV with a plate of easy finger-food. The word first appeared in the 1990s, entered the dictionary in 2006, and became a semi-official national anthem three years later with this joyous ad for potato crisps:

In this portrayal, mys is radically different to hygge. It is a celebration of the ordinary, witty and multi-cultural, featuring green-haired goths and a mixed-race family with small children. Food is central to fredagsmys, and what is the typical food of choice? Mexican, of course! Not a herring in sight.

Why Mexican? It seems nobody is really sure, but tacofredag now has roots in Swedish society. Tacos, tortillas, and all the accompanying spices and sauces take up a whole aisle of the typical Swedish supermarket. Swedes are accustomed to eating bread with various bits and pieces on top, according to a specialist in Swedish food culture, while the Swedish tradition of smörgåsbord (open sandwiches) makes a buffet meal seem natural. The fussiness of tacos is even reminiscent of a kräftskiva crayfish party.

There is no cultural exclusivity here. On the contrary, fredagsmys food could equally be Italian, North American, Middle-Eastern, British or French. And children are absolutely central to a good Friday cosy. 

With Swedish mys, everybody is welcome. Get cosy and relax, but do it by mixing and getting messy, rather than retreating into pure, perfect, rarified isolation. There is a time and a place for hygge. But the Swedish version is more real, more fun, and more inclusive.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

 
 
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