Inside Denmark’s Hardline Immigration Experiment

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is keen to have immigration policy back at the center of Danish politics. In fact, she believes it will dominate the upcoming election. In an interview with the newspaper, Politiken, Frederiksen described the lack of safety that she felt had become “the absolute biggest problem” for many Danes.

“Many of us know that there could be an assault at a subway station, or that a young guy could be sitting alone in the back seat of a bus, and suddenly two or three people with an Arab background come in and rip him apart,” Frederiksen, who leads the left-leaning Social Democratic party, said in September.

Her comments have upset many in progressive circles and especially the many now second- and third-generation Danish citizens of Arab descent, who have felt targeted and estranged from their native country as a result. But the statement seemed deliberately aimed at cementing the party’s position as tough on immigration, ahead of next year’s general elections.

In Denmark, where non-Western immigrants and their descendants comprise some 10% of its 6 million people, the issue of immigration was once a clear dividing line between left and right on the political spectrum. Today, being tough on newcomers is a cornerstone of political consensus. Over the past two decades, successive governments have tightened asylum laws, slashed welfare benefits for immigrants and pursued a zero-asylum policy. With that last goal nearly achieved — Denmark granted asylum to only 860 asylum seekers in 2024 — the supposedly center-left-leaning government is now promising even stricter rules.

It’s not only Denmark. Countries across the old continent are grappling with a surge of populist right-wing parties, and more established parties seem to be trying to draw lessons from the Danish experience. The U.K. home secretary recently sent officials to Denmark to study its border control and asylum policies. Denmark’s strict rules on family reunions and temporary refugee stays are among the policies under review, the Guardian reports. While “getting to Denmark,” as coined by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, may once have been considered the El Dorado of good governance, is this really where we all want to go?

The Seeds Of Anti-Elitism

In 1987, Denmark won its first Oscar with “Babette’s Feast,” an adaptation of a famous tale by Karen Blixen about a political refugee from France. Villagers greet Babette’s arrival in Denmark with sometimes subtle presumptions and whispered speculations. When, many years later, she wins the lottery, she throws an opulent banquet for the community with turtle soup, blinis crowned with caviar, and quail and foie gras. The villagers make a pact to reluctantly eat the foreign food, but take no pleasure in it.

The film’s interrogation of the parochialism of a small community and its fears toward the foreign and unfamiliar was a sign of the times, arriving at a moment when anti-immigration sentiments had started to seep into Danish politics. The right-wing Progress Party — born in the 1970s as a libertarian protest party against high taxes — had by the 1980s redirected much of its energy toward opposing Muslim immigration.

Its leader claimed that Turkish guest workers, invited during the economic boom of the 1960s, along with later refugees from Iran and Iraq, were eroding the Danish welfare state from within. Central to this critique was the 1983 Aliens Act — then the most liberal immigration law in Europe — that extended generous rights to individuals seeking asylum and family reunification. Even though immigrants from Muslim-majority countries were well under 2% of the population, the so-called party of progress cast such immigration as not just a threat to Danish national identity, but as something essentially incompatible with it. In doing so, the Progress Party attracted voters from smaller rural communities who were estranged from the educated elites of the capital, not entirely unlike the insular community depicted in “Babette’s Feast.”

Still, anti-immigration sentiments remained on the political fringes of the extreme far-right. Anti-immigration sentiments were fiercely rejected in remarks by politicians across the political spectrum throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. In a famous speech, then-Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, a Social Democrat, declared that the Progress Party would never become “stuerent,” literally “clean for the living room,” an idiom signaling the party’s inherent disreputability as political partners. For established parties, the Progress Party and its successor, the Danish People’s Party, were to be kept at arm’s length, eternally excluded from what was considered normal politics.

But that is a bygone era.

In 2001, Anders Fogh Rasmussen made a surprising but calculated decision to accept the Danish People’s Party’s outside support for his center-right minority government in order to gain a long-awaited premiership. With its 22 seats, the People’s Party now effectively had veto and bargaining power over government policy, notably on assimilation and immigration, and none of the responsibilities.

The depth of that influence was dramatized in an episode of the popular Danish television series “Borgen,” with an apt Machiavellian episode title, “The Art of the Possible.” The series follows a fictional prime minister who reluctantly adopts increasingly tighter immigration laws to secure her government’s survival and retain the outside support of the populist party. Throughout the series, the issue of immigration served as a prism for illuminating left-right divisions in Danish politics at the time and highlighting how a relatively small far-right party could exert disproportionate influence over a single topic.

In real life, Rasmussen’s early aughts government similarly adopted ever-tighter immigration and asylum laws, responding to the demands from the Danish People’s Party and a growing popular concern over what many on the right viewed as the country’s liberal family reunification laws. These reunification laws enabled a “chain” effect on migration, allowing the arrival and permanent settlement of relatives from non-Western countries who gained access to free healthcare, schools and universities, among other benefits of the Danish welfare state. Sometimes, proponents suggested, these family reunifications even occurred through forced or arranged marriages.

In 2001, a new “Ministry for Integration” was established to centralize political control over a domain that was no longer considered a peripheral social issue but one that had been elevated to the very center of the government’s agenda. The following year, the government passed new laws as part of a so-called “immigration package.” Among their new mandates were requiring foreign spouses to be at least 24 years old before applying for family reunification, longer reunification waiting periods, married couples needing to demonstrate ties to Denmark that were stronger than any other country, to pass a language proficiency test, and the payment of as much as $12,000 in today’s dollars for any future welfare expenditures.

Gradually, Rasmussen and his right-wing coalition grew less hesitant about using their new anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. Polls continuously showed that about half the population viewed immigration as a serious threat to Danish culture and throughout the aughts and the early 2010s, successive governments proposed increasingly harsher assimilation and migration policies, culminating in the controversial minister for integration, Inger Støjberg, posing by a birthday cake in her office to celebrate the government’s 50th tightening of immigration legislation.

At the border, officers gave increasingly more scrutiny to immigrants from non-Western countries. Denmark sharpened its external controls on immigration, using its long-standing opt-out from European Union asylum cooperation to limit the number of asylum seekers and reduce immigration incentives.

As Syrians were actively fleeing war and the Assad regime at the end of 2015 and in early 2016, Denmark partially closed its southern border with Germany and passed a new law that enabled border officials to confiscate jewelry and other valuables from refugees, in order to allegedly cover the cost of their asylum, and perhaps more importantly, to also deter Syrian asylum seekers from Denmark.

The Danish government ran ads in Arab-language newspapers, urging potential immigrants to reconsider Denmark as a destination and warning that social benefits had been halved, family reunification suspended and permanent residency contingent on mastering the Danish language.

In the span of about 15 years, what may have begun as concessions to a far-right support party had hardened into a governing consensus on the right and center-right of the political spectrum. More than 50 laws had been passed to tighten immigration, but in polling voters from these parties continued to ask for ever stricter laws and ranked immigration as one of their top three priorities.

The Mirror & The Wall

Denmark’s drastic measures drew heavy criticism throughout the aughts and 2010s from liberal and left-wing parties in parliament, as well as internationally from rights groups, United Nations agencies and even, notably, Denmark’s own neighbors. Though Germany and Sweden ostensibly have a similar political culture to Denmark, as mature democracies with a common history, these two neighboring countries effectively provided a contrasting mirror image to the Danes, displaying the progressive and solidaristic posture that outside observers typically expect from wealthy Northern European welfare states.

Unlike Denmark, in 2015, Germany was squarely at the forefront of Europe’s refugee crisis after the fallout of the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Syrian Civil War. In a decision unmatched across the continent, Germany’s government waived its asylum rules and welcomed more than a million refugees. Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous exhortation “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”) resonated among Europeans as a particular exemplar of how a political leader could guide her fellow citizens, given the country’s capacity and moral imperative to welcome refugees.

In the fall of 2015, another event emerged as a comparative foil to Denmark’s immigration policies. Public broadcasters invited Danish and Swedish politicians from across the political spectrum to a debate on immigration and refugee policy, broadcast live on national television.

It was remarkable to witness representatives of these two adjacent Nordic countries understanding each other while speaking in their respective languages — with no live translation or interpreter — and yet portraying such diametrically opposite views on immigration. Swedish politicians on the left and the right recalled their country’s historic role in welcoming refugees fleeing Nazism, Stalinism and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Then these politicians argued that Denmark’s policies were “cynical” and “racist,” comparing Denmark’s public discourse around Muslims to Nazi Germany’s 1938 rhetoric on Jews. Meanwhile, Danish politicians dismissed Sweden’s posture as naïve and disingenuous. They argued that Swedish media and policymakers embraced political correctness to the point of self-censorship and had therefore limited coverage of the country’s disastrous efforts at multicultural assimilation.

In Denmark in 2015, the Social Democratic Party, once the most representative in the nation, could — again — not form a new government. At the ballot box, the Danish People’s Party had become the second largest party in parliament with roughly 22% of the vote.

Then-party leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt resigned, and the Social Democratic party entered a period of introspection. The party needed to reinvent itself. But how? Long regarded as the architects and guardians of the Danish welfare state, Social Democrats had historically been defenders of poorer, working-class people. But those were the very people among whom the Social Democrats had steadily lost political ground. In rural and poor areas, voters were turning to the far right.

Some critics argued that Social Democrats had lost touch with the everyday concerns and cultural values of ordinary Danes and were now synonymous with the cosmopolitan elite of Copenhagen. Ordinary Danes, these critics suggested, were preoccupied particularly with immigrants coming from Muslim countries and their lack of assimilation. These Danes wanted to preserve the nation’s renowned welfare state but restrict its benefits to insiders — what political scientists today call “welfare chauvinism.” To regain power, pundits argued that the Social Democrats would have to platform the concerns of everyday Danes and reinvent themselves. That meant embracing a new platform of law-and-order, anti-immigration and anti-establishment policies typically associated with far-right parties.

Most notably, the Social Democrats endorsed a “paradigm shift” in Denmark’s migration and integration approach — from viewing refugees and asylum seekers as future citizens who could be permanently integrated into Danish society, to now temporary residents by default, who could be repatriated as soon as their home countries were considered safe.

The Social Democratic Party’s transformation proved highly successful. In 2019, the party returned to power under Mette Frederiksen, who quickly advanced a series of restrictive asylum and migration measures, openly pursuing a goal of zero asylum seekers. Asylum seekers could now be sent to another country for processing; rejected asylum seekers were sent to often newly expanded detention facilities to await deportation. Benefits were also cut, and family reunification laws tightened again by applying a ceiling on the maximum number of reunifications. Denmark also dropped its U.N. quotas for refugees to 200 a year, and revoked the temporary protected status for some Syrian refugees.

With such measures, Social Democrats transformed themselves from a center-left party into something farther to the right, absorbing much of the far right’s immigration platform and, to a certain extent, what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might call its cultural habitus. Frederiksen, active on social media, posts images of herself polishing her own windows or eating simple open-faced sandwiches. In her yearly televised New Year’s address, copies of bestselling novels around social issues were prominently displayed in the window beside her. Such novels have reignited debates about the lack of class mobility and steep societal divisions between urban and rural Denmark.

For the Social Democrats, being tough on immigration is a way to signal their ties to everyday Danes and their efforts to take seriously the anxieties of those who feel left behind by a changing world. Social Democrats have reclaimed voters from the Danish People’s Party and repositioned themselves as guardians of the welfare state. Yet the needle keeps moving — and further rightward.

Last year, the Social Democrats’ shadow minister for immigration and integration, Frederik Vad, delivered an influential speech in parliament that he called “the third realization.”  In this speech, Vad warned of a fifth column of Danish citizens with Muslim backgrounds who were allegedly “undermining Danish values from within.” In the subsequent public debate, a controversial book by the French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler about Islamist networks in France was used to back up this claim. Vad, for example, argued that Muslims working in public institutions like schools, libraries and hospitals should be scrutinized for potentially promoting Islamist values, and citizenship rights should be redefined to include aspects of loyalty and tilhørsforhold, or “belonging” to Danish society by adhering to its values and culture.   

Seeing their agenda adopted once again by the Social Democrats, the far-right People’s Party has quickly advanced its own, even more radical idea of “remigration” as a new frontline in Denmark’s migration debate.

The concept of remigration originates in the extreme ethno-nationalist Identitarian movement in France and is now banned by the French government. In Denmark, the far-right People’s Party advocates a remigration scheme that includes reviewing and potentially revoking Danish citizenship granted to migrants from Muslim‑majority countries over the past 20 years, followed by their forced mass deportation.

In support of remigration, the People’s Party has also proposed measures that, in the party’s own words, make it “close to impossible to live an Islamic lifestyle in Denmark.” Such steps include prohibiting halal foods in schools, banning sharia-based arbitration and potentially shutting down Muslim schools and cultural centers if they do not adhere to “Danish values.”

Ultimately, such targeted restrictions are meant to pressure Danish citizens of Muslim faith to lower their heads or be forced out. For now, remigration remains the official policy only of the People’s Party, though members of the center-right Conservative Party have expressed openness to discussing the idea.

Some experts, like Mira S. Skadegaard, a university professor who teaches about minority rights, have called remigration a modern form of ethnic cleansing against Muslim citizens in Denmark. Liberal party leader Martin Lidegaard recently denounced the Danish People’s Party’s remigration proposal as “wild, extremist, and un-Danish,” vowing to fight it both politically and legally. Denmark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, similarly warned in an interview in November that such a plan hitches the right-wing bloc to a wagon they will regret; he has urged more voices to speak out against it. Meanwhile, Kristian Madsen, now editor-in-chief of the A4 news outlet and a former speechwriter for the ex-Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, argues that remigration is a “disgusting” concept, and in a recent column, he called out today’s Social Democrats for sharing in the People’s Party premise that Muslims are unwanted in Denmark.

All this raises the question: How far right will — or can — this go?

Horseshoe Politics & Its Discontents

The mainstreaming of far-right positions that started two decades ago in Denmark is no longer an aberration, even in erstwhile strong liberal and open democracies like Sweden and Germany — and even in the U.S., it seems. The far-right Sweden Democrats Party, hitherto shunned by the rest of the parties in its parliament, has provided external support to help the conservative minority government stay in power for the last few years, much like the Danish People’s Party did at the beginning of this century. Their rise can be directly correlated to rising crime in Sweden’s degraded suburbia.

Similarly, in neighboring Germany, the far right and xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has witnessed a seemingly unstoppable rise in the polls. Earlier this year, another taboo was shattered when Germany’s Christian Democrats passed a parliamentary vote on citizenship rules and border controls with the support of the AfD, thus cracking the “firewall” against it that had endured until then.

It is no exaggeration to claim that in this sphere, Denmark was the canary in the coalmine — predating such developments elsewhere in Europe and the United States by multiple political cycles or even a generation. The question is, now, what this trajectory suggests about the state of democratic politics, of its normative underpinnings and where things might go in Denmark — and beyond — from here.

Compare, for example, the political consensus that has consolidated in Denmark around restricting immigration with that of a country like Italy, which has long been at the forefront of the fight against illegal immigration due to its geographic position in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Italians generally trace their experience with modern immigration back to Aug. 8, 1991, when Vlora, the first large boatload carrying 20,000 Albanian migrants, docked in the Southern port of Bari, Italy. Since then, immigration has easily been the most divisive and polarizing issue of Italy’s identity politics. Subsequent Italian right-wing governments have attempted various plans and agreements that were later adopted by the rest of Europe. In 2008, Italy and Libya signed a “Friendship Treaty” that included an apology for Italy’s prior colonialism and a $5 billion infrastructure fund in exchange for the repatriation of immigrants. The deal showcased the same transactional logic — immigrant repatriation in exchange for hefty payments to an autocratic regime — perfected nearly a decade later in a deal between the European Union and Turkey after the 2015 refugee crisis.

In 2022, Italy’s far-right party won government power for the first time. Since then, Italy’s far-right government has successfully pushed Europe to adopt similar accords from Tunisia to Egypt. Today, Rome operates an extra-territorial asylum processing center in Albania. In a social media exchange with one of the authors of this article, the Albanian philosopher Lea Ypi referred to this practice as “fascist humanitarianism.”

Remarkably, the discursive practices and policy positions of a Scandinavian Social Democratic-led government, traditionally known for its progressivism and solidarity, closely align with those of far-right governments, such as Italy’s. Copenhagen has teamed up with Rome to question the reach of the European Court of Human Rights, which has already ruled against some of Denmark’s immigration policies, and to call for a renationalization of judicial powers to rein in the Court’s reach and “make political decisions in our own democracies.” And Denmark was the first country in Europe to transfer asylum seekers to countries outside the EU for processing (that policy has since been put on hold).

References to Muslim migrants as threats are now used in Italian far-right political slogans,  but they were pioneered by the Danish far-right three decades ago and are now a staple of Denmark’s political conversation, even by left-leaning parties such as the Social Democrats. In the jargon of political scientists, this is a textbook example of the horseshoe theory, applied on a transnational scale.

 When in power, center-left governments in Italy also pursued severely restrictive immigration policies, much like the Biden administration in the United States was responsible for a volume of deportations comparable to that of the first Trump administration. Yet Europe’s center-left forces have generally struggled to reconcile their political narrative with their political reality. Instead, they continue their old efforts to rebuild consensus with other left-leaning political goals and groups, while attempting to ignore their discomfort with the so-called paradigm shift — from assimilation to repatriation — of Denmark’s supposedly center-left Social Democrats. As a result of such mixed messaging, Europe’s center-left coalitions have been routinely punished at the polls.

Today’s Danish experience, however, is very different, and it stands as an outlier. That’s because, according to research by political economist Laurenz Guenther, the public in virtually all European countries is consistently more culturally conservative than its respective political establishment and to the right of mainstream politicians on issues such as immigration and criminal justice. But the Danish Social Democrat Party’s transformation has meant that its positions on immigration and criminal justice are aligned with the public preferences of a slight majority of voters on non-Western immigration.

On the face of it, this alignment might make Denmark a virtuous paragon for representative democracy. But in practice, however, the Danish case shows a worrying involution of democratic politics. In their upcoming book “What Europeans Think About Immigration and Why it Matters,” political scientists Andrew Geddes and James Dennison show how the public tends to interpret immigration through emotional, cultural and selective narratives to make sense of it. Public perception of a need for more law and order tends to result in more radical policies to address this need — a dynamic that, in turn, has fueled the rise of anti-immigration movements on the right.

Of course, not everyone in Denmark is against immigration from non-Western countries. There is strong opposition from some progressive liberal circles in urban areas and from civil rights non-governmental organizations working with immigrant communities, as well as from younger generations.  This was also evident in the upset municipal election result in Copenhagen last month, where the Social Democrats lost power for the first time in 122 years to a Green Left candidate. But perhaps the most surprising voices critical of the government’s immigration policy are among the business community, which is typically more politically conservative and right-wing.

Confederation of Danish Industries CEO Lars Sandahl Sørensen and the Danish Chamber of Commerce’s Executive Director Brian Mikkelsen have consistently argued for a more open immigration policy to help address the country’s aging population and overheated labor market. With unemployment rates as low as 2.6%, Denmark needs foreign labor to supplement virtually all sectors, private and public. Unable to ignore these voices, the government has taken some targeted measures to make it easier for employers to sponsor non-EU skilled worker permits.

Similarly, steps have been taken to attract international students, particularly in science, math and technology. Still, the tough-on-immigration policy and suspicion toward immigrants from non-Western countries remain intact. In the now-infamous Politiken interview, the prime minister scolded a Danish university for having too many students from Bangladesh: “Last year, one in six new master’s students,” she quipped, “was from Bangladesh. I mean, when you say that sentence, you think it’s a lie.” 

When viewed in this light, the Danish case is less a model than a warning about what happens to democratic politics when politicians from the center and center-left move to the right to regain or retain power, rather than deliberating, informing and modeling responsibility and respect. What were once signature proposals in the far-right playbook are now mainstream policies, and — once effectuated by Denmark’s highly functional bureaucratic state — these proposals have a ripple effect on Danish society that has resulted in what sociologist Brooke Harrington terms “performative xenophobia.” Stringent migration laws and policy proposals signal toughness and Danish belonging, while conversely, those who criticize such proposals are perceived as naïve or disloyal to the homeland.

While immigration seems poised to dominate the upcoming election cycle’s discourse, as Denmark’s prime minister predicted, the broad public consensus around the current hardline posture means election results, paradoxically, are less likely to make a difference in determining Denmark’s stance on the subject.

The Danish experience offers a cautionary tale for other countries in Europe and beyond. Over the past two decades, adopting elements of the far-right agenda has not only made its policy propositions more acceptable and seemingly mainstream; it has created space for new demands from the far right, radicalized its discourse and increasingly normalized its worldview. If this is the final destination of “getting to Denmark,” it might not be worth the trip.