Welfare for whom?

It might seem strange to start a blog about a putative model country soon after the place has been vilified in the international media for its supposedly brutal treatment of desperate refugees. At a time when its policies are associated not only with Bernie Sanders but also with Donald Trump. So, some background information – certain to prompt objections.

The Danish center-right government came to power last year on a platform of enacting stricter laws and rules for refugees and immigrants. It has tried to limit the number of refugees the country accepts. It reduced the monetary support that refugees receive and increased the time they must wait before they can bring family members to the country. It lengthened the period before they can apply for citizenship and made citizenship requirements more stringent.

Visitors not welcome
More controversially, it put announcements in Lebanese and Jordanian newspapers explaining the measures in order to discourage refugees from coming. This was in September, during the surge of migration and the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, when Sweden and Angela Merkel were welcoming all comers. That made Denmark seem harsh in contrast and put it in the camp with Hungary, which refused to comply with EU agreements and built a fence, and Marine Le Pen.

The last straw for public opinion was a measure authorizing the police to confiscate refugees’ cash and valuables above 10,000 Danish kroner, or about $1,500 (originally 3,000 kroner), to pay for their upkeep. Although the plan excluded items with sentimental value, this was the image conjured up in the media – Nazis ripping wedding rings off fingers and extracting gold teeth. The prime minister was compared to Hitler in a British newspaper. 

Unworkable anyway 
The rationale for the measure was that instances of somewhat affluent refugees applying for aid had been reported in other countries (aside from the large number traveling on fake Syrian passports and rumors of Islamic State fighters in their midst). Also, Danish welfare recipients are subject to a similar limit (although no one could recall Danes’ homes being ransacked for hidden stashes of jewelry).

But the reality on the ground – that is, at the border – was that the police didn’t feel qualified to judge on the spot whether refugees had too much money and didn’t want the task either. So few assets ended up being confiscated. It might seem that Denmark got itself a nasty reputation unnecessarily, but like the newspaper announcements, the initiative served the purpose of discouraging people from coming.

Penalized for prescience
Since then, Sweden, Germany and the EU altogether have changed their tune and adopted a position closer to Denmark’s. Not only are they returning refugees; Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands also seized refugees’ personal property. In that respect, Denmark paid a price for being ahead of the game. It tried to remind the world that it still accepts an above-average number of refugees per capita, that its refugee benefits are much better than average, that its foreign aid as a percentage of GDP is among the highest in the world, and so on.

But if the general impression of intolerance from the “jewelry law” and the rest are difficult to shake, observers should note that many Danes opposed these measures – perhaps half at the peak of the crisis. They held demonstrations, transported refugees to Sweden personally and sometimes invited them into their homes, ranted on social media, wrote a series of op-eds expressing shame for a racist and xenophobic nation, and portrayed the Integration Minister Inger Støjberg trimming a Christmas tree decorated with a dead body. The government sank in opinion polls, and at times there was some doubt it would survive.

Fifth column on the dole
But to return to the original question: None of this invalidates the value of Denmark as an example of a successful social democracy for Bernie Sanders’s campaign or for America generally. It rather sets the issues in sharper relief. On the one hand, it might suggest that Denmark wants to reserve its welfare benefits for native Danes and that its prosperity or happiness owes something to its relative ethnic homogeneity. On the other, the consensus in Denmark now is that the integration of the existing minority population has failed and an increase in Muslim immigrants will exacerbate the problem of a “parallel society” outside the labor market.

After the terrorist attack last year and incendiary exhortations by certain imams, with a large majority of Danish Muslims favoring sharia law and Denmark sending the second-largest number of jihadists to Syria per capita, the dangers of Islamist radicalization have become more palpable.  Some see public support for forces that ostensibly want to undermine traditional Danish society as the strongest evidence that the welfare state has grown out of control.