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OPINION: Denmark’s new race to restrict immigration steals focus from pandemic

With a pandemic raging, Danish political discourse has once again turned towards a new focus on limiting immigration and asylum. Why?

Published: 4 February 2021 17:27 CET
OPINION: Denmark's new race to restrict immigration steals focus from pandemic
The Danish citizenship test. Photo: Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix

The Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration, in a recent statement, said that the number of asylum seekers who arrived in the country in 2020 was the lowest in almost 30 years.

In a January 30th press statement, the ministry noted that around 600 people were granted asylum in Denmark in 2020.

That figure corresponds to around 5 percent of the total who were granted asylum in Denmark in 2015, according to the ministry. That year saw a peak in refugee arrivals across Europe as hundreds of thousands fled armed conflicts in Syria and other countries.

While 600 were granted asylum last year, a total of 1,547 applied for it, according to an earlier ministry total – which means a large proportion had their asylum claims rejected.

READ ALSO: Denmark registered record low number of asylum seekers in 2020

“Far fewer (people) are seeking asylum in Denmark right now. That also means far fewer residence permits for refugees. In fact, the fewest we’ve ever registered under the system we use now. That’s really good news,” Minister for Immigration and Integration Mattias Tesfaye said in the January 30th statement.

The minister also said that “the government’s goal is essentially zero spontaneous asylum seekers,” reconfirming a stance both he and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had already expressed on the government’s behalf.

“We must do what we can to help the world’s refugees. But they don’t have the right to a future in a welfare state,” Tesfaye continued, noting that the government has earmarked “350 million kroner more than last year for things like helping refugees in nearby areas (to conflict)”.

The government is not alone in the Danish parliament in talking up restrictions on asylum seekers and immigrants.

On Wednesday, the opposition Venstre (Liberal) party presented a plan which it said would promote integration.

The plan includes compulsory work for refugees and immigrants on social welfare payments and reducing the current monthly social credit payment for refugees, known as integrationsydelse – which is already lower than the regular welfare benefit.

It also seeks to reintroduce a residency requirement (opholdskrav) for eligibility for unemployment cover through the A-kasse system, meaning foreign residents would not qualify until they have lived in Denmark for a set period. A controversial previous version of this rule was scrapped by the current government in 2019.

Additionally, the Liberal plan says it will take action against what it calls “a problem with social control in certain Muslim environments” by economically sanctioning homes which receive social welfare if women do not make themselves available to the labour market.

“If you can walk from Helmand to Hundige [town in Denmark, ed.], you can also go down to the park,” the Liberal spokesperson on citizenship, Morten Dahlin, said in a tweet in reference to the proposal to introduce compulsory work.

“That’s why the Liberals propose a duty to work both for those who have only just come to Denmark and for those who have been here for years,” Dahlin added.

Another party, the Conservatives, have meanwhile called for tighter citizenship rules including stricter demands on language proficiency.

READ ALSO: Applying for Danish citizenship: The process explained

Denmark, like all other countries, is still struggling with a devastating global pandemic. The challenges of that include its vaccination rollout, the effect of lockdown on mental health including amongst school children, and the impact on the economy, as well as ensuring healthcare services can cope with the additional strain.

Nevertheless, politicians remain keen to spend energy on talking up the need to again restrict immigration and asylum, despite the low numbers reported by the country’s immigration ministry.

The Social Democrats won the 2019 general election thanks in no small part to a promise to be tight on immigration. The positioning of Frederiksen and Tesfaye underlines that they intend to continue with this winning strategy.

Meanwhile, the turmoil in which the Liberals currently find themselves due to the resignation of their biggest anti-immigration profile, Inger Støjberg, means the centre-right party probably feels the need to show that its tough stance on immigration is its own, not Støjberg’s, position.

Foreign nationals who live in Denmark – whatever the reason they moved to the country – are likely to face more tight rules and othering in the public discourse as a result.

That is difficult at the best of times, but during a pandemic when many are unable to leave Denmark to visit loved ones, it feels particularly hard to take.

READ ALSO: How the dizzying cost of family reunification keeps Danes and foreign partners apart

 

Member comments

  1. If, as the author mentions, the government won an election due ‘in no small part’ to its promise to be tight on immigration then why is it a surprise that they implement the wishes of the electorate? Does the author not support Democracy? Perhaps, like most liberals / ‘far-left’, only when the result supports their own twisted world view?

    1. Its positive if a government is not openly racist. They say they are against one group, but the new government made people more patriotic and when you do not pronounce the local language danish correctly, then you get ignored, you don’t get the job etc Mob mentality. If the government openly says they do not like foreigners, but the birth rate in the western world is very low. Without immigrants there will not be enough people to take care of the old and there will be a shortage of workers driving wages up and who will pay those high wages? East europe and Russia has a extremely low birth rate, so it has to be non EU workers or the country has to get the birth rates up. The government should either encourage people to have more children or increase immigration. Hating one group of people does not help society in any way. If you think long term.

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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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