Denmark’s hardline immigration laws have caught Britain’s eye. Here’s why
By Christian Edwards, CNN
(CNN) — Denmark’s biggest exports include Ozempic, Carlsberg and Lego. But now, European leaders think it has something more valuable to sell: an immigration system tough and effective enough to neuter the hard right and keep mainstream parties in power.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has achieved what many center-left governments of recent years have found impossible: getting reelected. In an age when incumbents keep getting hammered at the ballot box, many in Europe are looking to the asylum policies of Frederiksen’s Social Democrats – which won elections in 2019, 2022, and, polls show, are on course to win again in 2026 – as a model to imitate.
Britain’s Labour government – which has been hounded by the populist Reform UK party over its struggle to control illegal immigration – has been so impressed by the Danish model that it sent officials to find out how the system works.
Announcing a radical overhaul of Britain’s asylum system on Monday, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, said while Britain had “held rigidly to the old model, other countries have tightened theirs.” She singled out Denmark as a poster child.
The old model referenced by Mahmood is a creature of Europe’s post-war milieu. The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 applied only to Europe and sought to settle wartime refugees – primarily Jews who survived the Holocaust, ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe and dissidents fleeing Soviet regimes. The treaty was expanded in 1967 to apply universally, in part to atone for colonialism.
But the proliferation of conflict and climate disasters – coupled with cheap travel, rising rates of literacy, and the ease of online communication – has put immense strain on the post-war architecture of asylum. At the end of last year, 123 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced according to the UN, up from about 44 million people in 2010. “Our asylum system was not designed to cope with this,” Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer said bluntly Monday.
Britain is now poised to embark on a policy route first charted by Denmark a decade ago. In 2015, Europe received its most requests for asylum in a single year since World War II, as civil wars in Syria and Libya helped spur around 1.3 million people to travel to the region, mostly from the Middle East. When Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel famously said “Wir schaffen das (We can do it)!” urging Germans to welcome in refugees, Denmark took a different approach.
Under Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Frederiksen’s predecessor as prime minister who then led the center-right Venstre party, Denmark aimed to reduce the number of asylum seekers, improve integration, and swiftly deport those who arrived illegally.
Rasmussen, who is now the foreign minister, first made refugee status temporary, not permanent. Before 2015, refugees could stay in Denmark for five years, after which their residence permits would automatically become permanent. Now, residence permits last for only one or two years, and refugees must wait for eight years before they can apply for permanent status. Even then, it is not guaranteed: Refugees must be fluent in Danish and have held a full-time job for several years.
Denmark has also made it harder for refugees to be joined by family members. Both must be aged 24 and above and have passed a Danish language test. The refugee must not have claimed government benefits for the past three years, and they must also put up a financial guarantee.
Michala Clante Bendixen, head of the refugee advisory group Refugees Welcome Denmark, said removing the assumption that refugee status will become permanent has been detrimental to integration.
“Attachment to the labor market, learning the language and understanding the society – these are very important things for successful integration,” Bendixen told CNN. But she feared the tightened requirements had “set the bar too high” for many new arrivals, discouraging some from trying at all – particularly older people with lower levels of education.
“It creates a feeling of hopelessness. I’ve met so many refugees who say, ‘No matter what we do, it’s never good enough. I have done everything they require of me, and still it’s not enough,’” she said.
Denmark has also been criticized for its policy on “ghettos” (now termed “parallel societies”), which allows the state to sell off or demolish housing estates where more than 50% of residents are from “non-Western” backgrounds. Successive Danish governments had worried about poor levels of integration in certain neighborhoods. In 2004, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned of areas where “the men are unemployed, the women are isolated, and the families speak only the language of their home country.”
A charitable interpretation of the “ghetto” law, introduced in 2018, is that it supports integration by encouraging people from different backgrounds to live together, not merely side-by-side. But not everyone is convinced. In February, a senior adviser to the EU’s top court said the policy amounts to discrimination based on ethnic origin.
Other laws have also been criticized by human rights groups. Under the so-called “jewelry law,” authorities can seize assets worth over 10,000 Danish Krone (around $1,500) to help cover the cost of asylum support. The measure was only applied 17 times over its first six years, but still has dark historical resonances, with some drawing comparisons to confiscations of valuables by the Nazi regime.
‘Performative cruelty’
Few dispute that Denmark’s policies have achieved their stated aim. In 2014, Denmark granted refugee status to 6,031 people. By 2019, that figure had dropped to 1,737.
While Denmark grants far more residence permits today than it did 30 years ago, the vast majority of these go to students and workers, not refugees. Of the 99,811 residence permits Denmark granted last year, just 859 went to asylum seekers – less than 1%.
“Denmark in recent decades has shown that it is politically and practically feasible to transition to a system of overall higher migration, and more employment- and education-intensive immigration,” according to a report last month from Bruegel, a Brussels-based economic think tank.
Over time, this has deterred refugees from seeking asylum in Denmark. Britain’s Home Office said Denmark’s policies had reduced asylum claims to a 40-year low and resulted in the removal of 95% of those whose claims are rejected. In 2024, there were four new asylum claims per 10,000 people in Denmark, compared to 16 per 10,000 in Britain, and 20 per 20,000 for the European Union as a whole.
Although the Danish model has won the Social Democrats praise abroad, some are growing disillusioned at home. In local elections Tuesday, Frederiksen’s party lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in more than a century. While much of the discontent is over the capital’s high housing costs, analysts say the party’s hardline stance on immigration has alienated its more progressive urban base.
Whether the Danish model can be imported wholesale by other governments remains to be seen. Britain plans to quadruple the wait for permanent settlement from five years to 20 – much longer than the eight-year wait for refugees in Denmark. A refugee’s status will be reviewed every two-and-a-half years; if their home country is deemed to have become safe during that time, they will be deported. Those seeking asylum could also be stripped of assets including jewelry to cover the costs of their accommodation.
Bendixen warned the new 20-year path to permanent settlement would destroy refugees’ sense of the future and make them “feel like they are second class citizens forever.”
“Integration fails when you give young people the feeling that they don’t belong. That’s where you see gangs and crime and areas where people have their own rules. That’s because they don’t feel like they’re part of society. A rule like this would make (that feeling) much, much stronger,” she said.
Many UK Labour Party politicians would agree. Although Starmer, like Frederiksen, insists that a more stringent asylum system is compatible with the progressive values of compassion and tolerance, others say the proposals are needlessly cruel and will not have the desired effect.
“Plans to leave refugees in a state of perpetual uncertainty about where and if they can rebuild their lives are not just performative cruelty, they are counterproductive to integration and the economy,” Stella Creasy, a Labour MP, said Monday.
Alf Dubs, a Labour member of the House of Lords who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939 fleeing the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, told the BBC that he was “depressed” by Labour’s hardline turn, and called the new measures “a shabby thing.”
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