Refugees are welcome in Denmark after all

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Refugees are welcome in Denmark after all

Refugees welcome here! Denmark has announced that it expects an influx of up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. That’s an enormous increase for a country whose immigration minister said in January that he was pleased there were only 2,095 applications for asylum in 2021.

Ukrainians in Poland boarding a bus to Denmark. Photo: Paw Lindegaard Nielsen © DR.

Denmark has not taken in more than 4,000 refugees in any year since the migration wave from the war in Syria in 2015, when the country received 21,000 asylum applications. Estimates of the number of arrivals range from 20,000 to 30,000. Minister of the Interior Kaare Dybvad Bek expects that it could exceed 40,000 after Easter vacation.

Emergency residency law

Last month Parliament passed a special law to enable Ukrainians to get residency and work permits quickly. It waives the normal limit on residency of 90 days without a visa or an asylum claim, and the Ukrainians thus need not be part of the asylum system. They will also be exempt from the country’s infamous “jewelry law” from 2016, which allowed authorities to confiscate valuables from refugees but perhaps has never been enforced.

The effort will be expensive. It has cost DKK 2 billion so far. Most of these funds have been taken from the government’s foreign aid budget, a tactic that not all parties are happy with. If up to 100,000 refugees come to Denmark, it will cost DKK 8-10 billion per year (DK). Like the rest of the world’s nations, Denmark has already seen its public budget balloon during the pandemic of the past two years. The logistics of the accommodations will also be difficult; there aren’t enough facilities to house a fraction of the number expected. There are also questions about equal treatment and priorities.

Ethnic favoritism?

One might well wonder why the country is so eager to take in Ukrainians when it has been tightening its asylum and immigration regulations for several years. “A series of clever decisions have been made which have continually ensured better control of immigration,” said Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye about the decline in asylum applications.

The Social Democratic administration has been criticized by its European counterparts as well as Danish immigration activists for revoking asylum status for Syrian refugees while the situation in Syria remained unstable. Some critics call the difference in policy racist. Is it owing to the fact that Ukrainians are white and Christian, unlike many refugees and migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan? At a protest demonstration (DK) held on 2 April before the Ministry of Immigration and Integration, a spokesman for the Syrian Refugees in Denmark demanded that all refugees be treated according to the new residency law for Ukrainians.

European solidarity

Testfaye stated that Denmark’s response is appropriate when “a European country is attacked, a country close to us.” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also argued that the situation is different “because Ukraine is our region.… It’s our back yard, if you like.” Pia Olsen Dyhr, the chair of the left-leaning Socialist People’s Party, concurred, asserting mistakenly that “there’s only one country between us and Ukraine, and that’s Poland.” Even the parties that have been most opposed to immigration are ready to welcome Ukrainians, like the others justifying the decision by the concept of nærområde (“nearby area”) and denying that religion plays any role.

The Danish public seems to agree with the view that Ukrainians share European cultural values as exemplified by their interest in joining the EU and NATO and will therefore be easier to integrate. It doesn’t hurt either that they are used to working and that Denmark is experiencing a labor shortage. There have been some difficulties getting refugees from non-Western countries into the labor force.

Inger Støjberg, the former immigration minister who was impeached for abusing her office, disavows the prevailing rationale: “No one dares to say it like it is: It's because the Ukrainians are more like us and because they are primarily Christians."

Now where to put them?

Housing the refugees will be the responsibility of the municipalities. The distribution of refugees (DK) among them depends on how many immigrants from non-Western countries the municipalities already have. Those with many such immigrants will get no Ukrainians. The municipalities where refugees have arrived are scrambling to find accommodations. They use public housing, dormitories, facilities that were set up for Covid-19 isolation, and sports complexes.

Copenhagen Municipality, which has by far the largest number of refugees and has a perennial shortage of low-income housing, is considering building a “pavilion-city” that would house 330 refugees (DK) for three years and include a day-care center. Critics warn against isolating the Ukrainians in another “parallel society.”

Private citizens are also encouraged to take refugees into their homes. They are eligible for compensation of up to DKK 500 ($75) per day, but they receive much less than that. Although the funding comes from the state, it must be administered by the individual municipalities, which set the rates and rules. Some of them hesitate to use the funds at all because the program is difficult to manage and control. Some private citizens who share their homes (DK) with refugees are already becoming impatient with the strain and are asking the municipalities for more help.

Children and accidental guest workers

Housing isn’t the only logistical issue. After the first wave, the residence permit application system became overloaded. People could not get appointments at three of the four regional Citizens’ Services offices, and new offices needed to be set up.

There will be great pressure on schools and day-care institutions. Education Minister Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil is calling for retired teachers and day-care staff (DK) as well as students in relevant programs to assist with the influx. Student associations from the country’s seminaries have expressed a willingness to help. The schools will need to set up special tracks with native-language instruction and recruit Ukrainian teachers and others to staff them.

Filling job vacancies with Ukrainian refugees won’t be a simple matter either. Because of Ukraine’s conscription policy, most of the refugees are women and children. Ukrainian women have been part of the labor force, but it can take time to place them in suitable positions, warns Mads Lundby Hansen from the CEPOS think tank. The benefits for the Danish economy would come over the longer term, he adds, and the Ukrainian ambassador says that Denmark shouldn’t create conditions for Ukrainians to stay here for the rest of their lives. Even if they don’t, perhaps the country should remain prepared for additional surges of refugees in the new global disorder. 

Replacing the Danes

Denmark’s immigrant population has increased only slightly since the wave of refugees and migrants came up into Europe in 2015. Yet in certain quarters, the number appears to be rising at an alarming rate. In an op-ed column in Jyllands-Posten entitled “Everyday jihad is a result of the increasing demographic replacement” (DK), Pia Kjærsgaard, the founder of the Danish People’s Party, wrote that Denmark’s survival as a homogeneous nation was being threatened. The reason for her concern was that she read that the non-Western population in the country was some 400,000 larger than the official figure from Statistics Denmark.

In Information, another Danish daily, Serge Savin looked into the figures (DK) and found the situation different than Kjærsgaard implied in more than one way. The figure that Kjærsgaard referred to  derives from a book, Integration – her går det godt (Integration: It’s going well here), by Hjarn von Zernichow Borberg, external associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Economic Institute. Statistics Denmark had registered 800,000 immigrants and their descendants, and von Zernichow Borberg first listed 1.2 million and then revised it down to 1.1 million.

Fun with math
So the difference in the two figures is really 300,000 and not 400,000. The reason for the difference, von Zernichow Borberg explains, is that Statistics Denmark counts only children with two foreign parents and he added children with a single foreign parent. But those parents are not all from non-Western countries; they are foreigners from the entire world. He estimates that around 100,000 are from non-Western countries. Furthermore, von Zernichow Borberg continues, Kjærsgaard implies that the threat to Danish culture comes from increasing Muslim influence, and not all of these parents from non-Western countries are from predominately Muslim countries. They may be from China or Ukraine. The estimate of additional children with a parent from a Muslim country is 25,000. Here are current figures from Statistics Denmark.

The more accurate figure for the additional, at least partially Muslim population above the official figure is thus around one-sixteenth of the number that Kjærsgaard cites. As Savin notes, the demographic replacement theory has a long racist history. It got a strong boost from Renaud Camus’s Le grand remplacement in 2012 and figured in various right-wing extremist and white supremacist terrorist actions such as those in Utoya and Christchurch. In the US, it burst into prominence in the chant, “The Jews will not replace us,” in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Kjærsgaard did not wish to comment on the Information article, but another member of the Danish People’s Party, Martin Henriksen, found no reason to avoid the term “replacement” because it was “the best way to get the message out.”

Concept creep: The better it gets, the worse it seems
The surprising thing about such alarmism coming at this moment is that integration seems to be working in Denmark much better than it had before. And that is owing to some degree to the many restrictive measures that the preceding center-right administration implemented, partly at the urging of the Danish People’s Party. The country suspended participation in the UN quota refugee system and discouraged migrants. The new Social Democratic administration thus far has softened those restrictions only slightly. It is coming under some pressure from its supporting left-wing parties to do more, though, and perhaps that is what Kjærsgaard and her allies want to discourage. The further irony, noted by von Zernichow Borberg, is that the additional number of children should be viewed as a positive sign. Muslim immigrants have been criticized for maintaining a separate, “parallel society,” and intermarriage is clearly a step toward integration.

PC in DK, 2019

Perhaps I was too quick to say that Denmark is trailing the Anglo-American world in social justice activism and scandals.  Peter Rasmussen has posted a useful list of the “most absurd PC moments in Denmark in 2019” (DK) on Quora. He links to his individual commentaries on five incidents - good examples of how the country is striving to catch up to the achievements in outrage and grievance in more advanced precincts.

 Hating hate
The first concerns Facebook comments  by Black Lives Matter spokesperson Bwalya Sørensen about Pernille Vermund, the leader of the New Right party (and subject of a recent post). Vermund had expressed her happiness that a 14-year-old Thai girl who had been forced to leave Denmark because of strict family reunification rules was allowed to return. Sørensen wrote to Vermund: “You disgusting Nazi shit… How dare you use a little girl to spread your racist, hateful, verbal diarrhea… You stinking pile of garbage …” (my translation, may differ from the original English). Sørensen seemed to imply that Vermund  favored deporting all Muslims (“her evil wish to shamelessly follow in her Fuhrers [sic] footsteps and cleanse Denmark of a whole religious group, 30s style”) and was therefore being hypocritical. As far as I know, the girl, known by her nickname, Mint, is not a Muslim. 

Job theft 
The second instance involves criticism in an op-ed piece of a thin actress for playing a fat character in the film Harpiks (Resin). This was considered discriminatory and fat-phobic because fat characters should be played only by fat actors – the same type of objection that led Scarlett Johansson to drop out of a transgender role. The writer is shown wearing a shoulder bag with the slogan “Fatties against fascism.” 

Depicting another ethnic group
In a similar vein, a documentary film, Dreams from the Outback, was excluded from film festivals (DK) because the  director was white and whites should not be allowed to make films about Australian aborigines and other minority cultures. The director noted that aborigines don’t often have the resources to make a film themselves, and they might well benefit from an increase in awareness in the outside world.

Everyday abuse is worse on holidays 
Fourth, Micah Oh, who teaches structural racism and cultural appropriation at the University of Copenhagen, warned against girls’ dressing up for Halloween as the Arab Princess Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin because it could be perceived as “everyday racism" and offend people. Parents should tell them that they should be Sleeping Beauty instead. But with “Little girls first of all need to pretend to be princesses,” wasn’t Oh being somewhat discriminatory herself by stereotyping girls like that, besides ignoring the same pitfalls for all the little boys who might also wish to play princess?

Fighting racism with its own weapons
Finally, the Nørrebro Pride parade is an alternative to and protest against the annual Copenhagen Pride parade because of the latter’s commercialization, its acceptance of sponsorship from capitalist conglomerates and financial firms, and the participation of “racist politicians.” In the Nørrebro Pride parade, the LGBT+ people of color - “double minorities” - marched at the head of the procession, while white LGBT+ persons came afterward and cleaned up after the party. The parade thus not only offered an alternative for those who didn’t wish to be associated with mainstream racism; by reintroducing racial segregation, it also provided an opportunity for the descendants of racist oppressors to experience racism themselves.

While these events represent  noteworthy strides in identitarian political action, they fall short of the dramatic harassment, physical attacks, vandalism and riots that greeted, say, Milo at Berkeley or Charles Murray at Middlebury. No one was fired or even hounded off social media for following a custom or holding an opinion that was unremarkable ten years ago. Some targets may have suffered slight reputational damage, and others might have been slightly guilted – those racist princess costumes! These results may be disappointing to subjugated and aggrieved groups whose existence is being denied or erased, but the local warriors are mashaling their forces and learning the necessary epithets, tropes and tactics, and perhaps this is only the warm-up stage in the long struggle for intersectional justice and equity in Denmark. 

Tak, Peter.

Immigrant children are getting more education than Danes

The results of a new study (DK)  from Think Tank DEA surprised researchers. They show that, after the data are adjusted for the families’ financial background, more children of non-Western immigrants are completing a course of higher education than so-called “ethnic Danes.” 

The study compares the number of young people who have taken a bachelor’s degree within 10 years of graduating from elementary school, that is, ninth grade, in the period 2002-08. The subjects are broken down into quintiles on the basis of their parents’ income. The results are consistent across the income spectrum: 8 to 10 percent more of the children of non-Western immigrants – both those born in Denmark and born elsewhere – attain a degree than Danes. The percentage ranges from about 30 percent for the lowest quintile to 60 percent for the highest. 

Without the adjustment, this still isn’t the case. The gross average for all Danes is 33 percent and for immigrant youth is a couple of points lower. The difference in the two results reflects the fact that there are relatively few children of immigrants in the highest quintile segment. Another qualification is that Danish youth may take longer to finish college because more of them take a supplementary year before starting gymnasium (high school) and take a gap year before college.

Breaking the trend and the pattern
Nevertheless, the results are seen as a significant success for recent efforts to get more children of immigrants to pursue higher education. The accepted “story” in Danish society about ethnic minorities and education, especially in recent years during the rise of nationalist sentiment and the Danish People’s Party, has been that the lack of education and interest in education among immigrant children were a prime factor in preventing meaningful integration. 

For a few years now, however, immigrant girls have constituted an exception to this image. A study from the Economic Council of the Labour Movement (DK) published in September showed that, of children of parents without an education, more girls with an immigrant background completed a degree than Danish girls as well as boys, or became “pattern-breakers” who exemplify social mobility. Even in gross terms, without considering parental  background, immigrant girls recently surpassed Danish boys in educational attainment.

Girlbosses on the march or boys playing hooky
I would draw two conclusions from the study, one fairly obvious: The problem is with boys, particularly low-income boys of all ethnicities. It is well known that girls have been overtaking boys in the educational system for years in the US as well as Denmark. With the outsourcing and automation of manufacturing, academic training is necessary to thrive in the knowledge economy, and girls have seen women advancing into professional careers for at least a generation.

Critics have said that the educational system is geared towards girls, who are able to sit still, concentrate and communicate verbally at an earlier age than boys, and that boys become discouraged and fall behind. Another explanation in the Danish context is that immigrant girls are encouraged to pursue education as the path toward integration in Danish society and are receptive to the message, while boys are “left on their own” and are more likely to end up in vocational training if they pursue a career. In any case, the fact that, taking into account their economic background, immigrant boys show the same margin of superiority in education to Danish boys is a striking development.

The stick and the carrot
The other conclusion will be less palatable to many. That is, that the hard line on immigration and integration taken by the preceding (center-right) Liberal administration in both policy and rhetoric has been effective in changing attitudes toward integration among immigrants. Inger Støjberg, the Minister for Immigration and Integration from 2015 to 2019, was mocked and vilified for her 100-plus measures to restrict immigration and reduce social benefits for immigrants. She was accused of being cruel, of increasing child poverty, and of flouting international conventions. She is still the subject of an investigation (DK) for allegedly separating refugee couples in which the girl was a minor automatically, disregarding their right to a hearing on their residential accommodations. 

Despite the legitimate criticisms, it is likely that the reduced number of immigrants has made it easier for the educational system and social services to help steer those already living here into productive career paths and has mitigated the sense of a separate social underclass in immigrant neighborhoods that is exacerbated by a steady flow of new arrivals. And that the insistent rhetoric about the necessity of rejecting Sharia law and accepting the norms of Western society, such as equal protection and equal opportunity, has helped to persuade immigrant families that formal education is the best means of promoting their children’s success and happiness. These effects are probably the reason that the new Social Democratic administration, in its approach to integration, has only moderated its predecessors’ harshest measures and maintained the emphasis on liberal democratic values.

What’s in a name: Parsing racial slurs in Denmark

Last week I wrote about the relative paucity of controversy about social justice and political correctness in Denmark. But there are often minor incidents that indicate the status of the culture wars in the country. Most often they concern race and immigration A couple of recent incidents involved a fairly new political party, the Nye Borgerlige (The New Right), which was founded in 2015. 

On December 17, Denmarks Radio, the state television network, broadcast a short documentary about the party’s campaign to gain a foothold in Parliament in the June 2019 election (Vermund and the battle for the right wing (DK)). It focused almost exclusively on Pernille Vermund, the party’s co-founder. Vermund is a former member of the Conservative Party who sought to create a niche that combined aspects of the xenophobic but welfare-state-friendly Danish People’s Party and the economically libertarian Liberal Alliance Party. The party’s platform had three key conditions for supporting the current center-right government: a moratorium on accepting refugees, the deportation of foreigners convicted of crimes, and a requirement that foreigners support themselves. Its main stated objective was to preserve Danish culture and values.

Competing for anti-immigration voters
It appeared from polls that the party was taking voters from Denmark’s People’s Party. But during the campaign, a newer, more virulent anti-immigrant party obtained enough signatures to get on the election ballot. This was Stram Kurs (Hard Line), led by Rasmus Paludan, who advocated deporting all Muslims and whose public appearances drew counterdemonstrations from Antifa that turned violent. The New Right thus now had a rival faction to the right that was also drawing voters from Denmark’s People’s Party. Paludan was considered a crude interloper, while Vermund was a presentable sophisticate from the wealthy northern suburbs. In the election, the New Right received 2.5 percent of the votes and gained the minimum number of parliamentary seats, and the Hard Line fell just short of the 2.0 percent threshold. Overall, the left-wing parties won a secure 91-75 majority, with the Danish People’s Party suffering the greatest losses.

Wedding-day jitters
Six months later, the documentary included a kind of open-mic moment that had nothing to do with the campaign. The governing administration had announced the election in May, one week before Vermund’s planned wedding (she married entrepreneur, investor and author Lars Tvede). On the morning of the wedding, Vermund was hanging campaign posters on lampposts with her staff. It was warm, and she was wearing shorts. She wasn’t being interviewed, and they weren’t discussing the election. The camera watched them from across the road. When a limousine passed, Vermund remarked that it was a perker, a derogatory term for people of Middle Eastern or Arabic background with a connotation similar to the notorious American N-word but not quite as charged. She immediately covered her mouth with her hand, and someone standing by her quickly added “En udlænding” (a foreigner), a more politically palatable description. (Only “more” PC because the people in question may well have been Danish citizens whose parents or grandparents were immigrants.)

This little remark prompted accusations of racism and calls for Vermund to apologize by representatives of other parties. In an interview with the tabloid BT (DK), Vermund refused to apologize. She maintained that she was informal and outspoken, that this had been a private situation with familiars, that the word referred to a particular subculture, that it shouldn’t be considered offensive if it is not used maliciously, and that she wouldn’t use it in Parliament. Vermund, who happens to be an attractive blonde in her early forties, has at times behaved impulsively, once saying that she found women attractive and French-kissing a (male) comedian on a talk show. She said that it’s good to provoke the liberal intellectual elite (DK) who think they are more open-minded than others.

Forgiving jihadism?
The word perker is indeed considered by most to be a vulgarity in any context, certainly any involving a politician. It suggests condescension at best and possibly an instinctive aversion to ethnic minorities or a lack of compassion. It tarnished the veneer of slick confidence of Vermund and her neoliberal supporters and lessened their distance from Paludan’s motley Hard Line. One might ask why the camera was turned on at that moment when nothing significant was happening and whether Vermund and her staff knew it was on, although that doesn’t change the fact that the word slipped out and was captured.

This slip-up aired just a week after another incident involving the New Right that reached its conclusion. MP Mette Thiesen was convicted of libeling a fitness instructor (DK), Mahmoud Loubani, by calling him a “terrorist sympathizer” in a Facebook post. The background is a little murky. Earlier Thiesen had written a post about a threat made against her. Loubani, who had appeared on a television program, wrote a comment on it wondering whether Thiesen had made up the threat herself, with laughing emojis. Thiesen read through Loubani’s posts and found that he had once written “Allah yerhamo” (May God forgive you) apparently about Omar El-Hussein, the young radicalized Muslim who murdered two people in 2015, a film director outside a panel discussion with a cartoonist and a volunteer security guard at a synagogue. 

Thiesen maintained that she had deliberately refrained from calling Loubani a “terrorism sympathizer,” but the judge found that her epithet must ordinarily be understood to mean that Loubani endorsed the terrorist action. She had to pay a small amount to Loubani for damages and legal fees (under $5,000 in total), but she was acquitted of criminal charges because Loubani had not filed them within six months of the incident.

Small parties come and go
Is the lesson here that the New Right’s leaders need better PR discipline? Neither incident is more unusual than behavior that emerges periodically from the Danish People’s Party, and they apparently have little consequence. Telltale indiscretions followed by obligatory indignation and then exculpatory rationalizations – fairly tame business as usual that can’t compare to saying that Mexicans are rapists and Congresspersons are treasonous human scum.

It’s not clear yet whether there is indeed a place for nationalist libertarians on the crowded political landscape. Recent attempts by the right-wing coalition to blend these elements did not succeed, and the New Right is now polling below the parliamentary threshold. It is not sitting idle in its legislative seats, however. Most recently it initiated a farfetched campaign (DK) against the new center-left administration’s removal of restrictions on social benefits for immigrant families. It proposed holding a referendum on the issue and got support only from the Denmark’s People’s Party. 

The burka ban comes to Denmark

The opening of the Danish Parliament in the first week of October is traditional occasion to take stock of the political situation: the balance of power, the administration’s intentions and its chances of fulfilling them. This year a leading theme is a rift in the Liberal Party, the largest party in the government coalition. The week before, the party’s immigration spokesperson, Marcus Knuth, commented favorably on Facebook on the success of the xenophobic AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in the German election.

Knuth’s colleague, Jan Jørgensen, responded “WTF” (in English – maybe it’s becoming a global trope in political commentary at this historical juncture). Knuth walked back his remark: By a “better balance” in the German Parliament, he meant that he hoped that the conservative parties would get tougher on immigration in order to pre-empt the rise of far right.

Those cartoons again

Around the same time, Inger Støjberg, the outspoken immigration minister, also took to Facebook to comment on an exhibition on blasphemy at the Skovgaard Museum in Viborg. She noted that the show omitted the most famous example of blasphemy in Denmark in recent times, the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten in 2005 that led to riots in the Arab world. It wasn’t enough for her to reiterate her dedication to the principle of freedom of expression. She also shared a screenshot of her iPad background – the most famous of the cartoons, the one by Kurt Westergaard with a bomb in Mohammed’s turban.

The reaction from the media and opposition figures was to criticize Støjberg for gratuitous provocation – even egotistical and childish grandstanding – or to make fun of her for not having a more personal photo on her iPad. Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen made a suitably politic response (DK): He wasn’t “proud of any cartoons” himself, but he was proud to live in a country with freedom of expression.

Rounding up a majority

This was only a warm-up for one of the main items on the parliamentary agenda: a ban on burkas and niqabs. The far-right Danish People’s Party has been pushing for this for a while, but the Liberal Party had resisted. Similar laws in France and Belgium were recently upheld by the European Court of Human Rights. That was perhaps the factor that tipped the Liberal Party in favor of the proposal despite opposition from some of its leading figures.

The bill is formulated as a ban on masks, not specifically religious attire. It would thus apply as well to the ski masks sometimes worn by anti-fascist demonstrators who sometimes commit vandalism. The Liberal Party explains that it must balance the considerations of freedom to dress as one wants with the principle that in an open society, people need to be able to see one another. The Liberal Alliance, Denmark’s most libertarian party, also changed its position to support the proposal, citing the oppression of women that the burka represents.

Along with the long-time support of the Conservative Party, that was enough to give the proposal a majority. Since the government’s decision was announced, the Social Democrats, who had said they were waiting to see the actual proposal, also decided to support the measure (DK). 

Combating sexism with a dress code

Both the flaunting of the cartoon and the burka ban are seen as hardline moves by the government against the spread of the “parallel” Muslim society. But isn’t anyone bothered by a contradiction between the ban and the celebration of freedom of expression? Yes. Of the three leading daily newspapers, only the conservative Berlingske Tidende (DK) favors the ban. Both the further-right Jyllands-Posten (DK) (where the Mohammed cartoons appeared) and the left-leaning Politiken (DK) oppose it.

There are only an estimated 100 to 200 women in the country who wear a burka or niqab. No one suggests they are a security threat, and the police are pretty busy with gang wars at the moment. These are consenting adults after all. Some may be victims of coercion, others have been indoctrinated to accept their “oppression,” and others yet are educated ethnic Danish converts.

A ban on masks at demonstrations could be enforced without its being extended to religious clothing. The ban is thus largely a symbolic gesture of disapproval of fundamentalist Islam. Whether you favor it depends on whether you consider the threat of Islam to be so urgent that it justifies compromising the freedom of expression that is “fundamental” to a liberal democracy or whether you want to score political points with a certain constituency. In a recent poll (conducted just after a Danish modeling agency had announced its first hijab-wearing model), some 62% of Danes favored the ban.

The agonies of European multiculturalism

Douglas Murray is a British journalist and associate editor at the Spectator. His latest book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam, which came out earlier this year, is of great importance for understanding developments in the past 50 years in Europe. It concerns the growing Muslim population in the region that poses an intractable social problem because it is not being integrated in European culture. A combination of mass migration, a falling birth rate among Europeans, and the acquiescence of Western European politicians has led to a situation in which traditional liberal Western values are being undermined.

The acts of jihadist terrorism that the book recounts are well known. The less sensational but disturbingly frequent incidences of rape and anti-Semitic attacks are also becoming familiar. The most shocking revelations of the book, however, concern the denial and guilt displayed by Western European politicians and the mainstream media, partly because they run counter to the skepticism about immigration that Western European populations have shown since the 1960s.

From guest workers to sharia law

At that time, when there was a labor shortage, Western European countries invited “guest workers” from Turkey and elsewhere to fill the shortfall. They were expected to return home when they were no longer needed, but they stayed. They were expected to become integrated, and when they did not, politicians denied that there was a problem because they were afraid of being called racist and would not admit that their policies had been mistaken. The police and the media supported this position by suppressing news of gang rapes and white slavery, for example.

Even though the large majority of the Muslim population does not commit acts of terrorism and violence, there is surprisingly widespread support among it for sharia law, the Islamic State, honor killings, female genital mutilation, and so on. The earlier predictions of problems that were treated as alarmist proved to be underestimated.

A religion of peace

And when news of atrocities did get out, politicians insisted that the acts had nothing to do with Islam, a religion of peace. They blamed their own culture for its colonial history and maintained that Europe had a unique responsibility to shelter even those opposed to its basic values. This is political correctness taken to masochistic lengths. At various times, for example, Swedish cabinet members and prominent figures have said that everyone is a migrant, that Swedes were jealous of the authenticity of Middle Eastern culture, and that a failure to accept migrants was equivalent to the Holocaust.

The book describes this syndrome in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, and it also describes a resistance to it in eastern Europe, notably Hungary. It makes little reference to Denmark besides the Mohammed cartoon crisis, but the implication of its message for Denmark is striking: with its infamous 50+ measures to restrict immigration, the current Danish government is actually taking the course that Murray recommends to mitigate the worst integration problems afflicting its neighboring countries.

Fake Syrians and children

Consider the issue of repatriating people whose applications for asylum have been rejected. In Germany, Sweden and elsewhere, there have been thousands of cases of people whose applications have been rejected for making false claims of being Syrians, of being minors or of being persecuted on political grounds. In very few cases, are they returned to their homeland or to the country where they should have sought asylum according to the Dublin III accord. The authorities lose track of them. Perhaps they survive economically on the black market or join criminal gangs. In any case, the official policies are considered impossible to enforce.

In Denmark, the number of such cases is relatively small, but they have been identified: In the first half of 2017, some 1,835 rejected applicants were repatriated. As of August 3, there were 941 waiting to be repatriated (DK), including 434 who could not be repatriated because of difficulties reaching agreements with their home countries. There is a debate between humanitarian organizations, which argue that those who cannot be sent home be given residence or work permits, and the administration, which argues that such measures would encourage others to enter the country on false pretenses.

Racist or realist?

Rejected asylum applicants have also escaped from Danish refugee centers and disappeared from view, but the concrete figures on the issue, the open debate on the policy and the negotiations conducted with the applicants’ home countries set Denmark apart from the usual practices and attitudes that Murray describes. The center-left Social Liberal party now also favors (DK) a reduction in the number of refugees, and the Social Democrats now propose (DK) following the Australian model in which applicants are processed outside the country. Because of a reduction in the number of applicants, Denmark using the allocated funding to support refugee camps (DK) in North Africa, as Murray and others recommend.

Denmark has been vilified for exemplifying xenophobic tendencies that have appeared in France, Germany and elsewhere, but if Murray’s portrayal is credible, its recent policies exemplify rather a more candid and realistic attitude toward the European cultural crisis than is found in most of the continent.