Denmark has significantly tightened its migration policy in recent years. This corresponds to a broad social consensus. But there is a danger that one group will be left behind that could be a model for successful integration – the second generation of immigrants.
Danish high school graduates celebrate their graduation. For some of them, however, the future is uncertain – if they are children of immigrants who do not have Danish citizenship.
The unpleasant surprise came for Eldison on his eighteenth birthday. In the form of a letter from the administration of his residential community, the small town of Sönderborg in southern Denmark. Because he was now of legal age, he had to apply for a residence permit, the paper said. That hit Eldison like a bolt from the blue. Why would he, who was born, raised and educated in Denmark, apply for something like that?
Just as unpleasant as this letter was the prospect of what would now await him: a struggle with offices and regulations that would last for months or years. In the best-case scenario, the end result would be Danish citizenship. He didn’t even want to think about the worst case scenario. He left that to his work colleagues at the forwarding company where he did an apprenticeship. From then on, they used to joke that if he didn’t come to work one day, he would probably have been deported. This is how the case was described by a reporter from the Danish broadcaster DR.
Eldison Abulovic, now twenty, whose parents fled the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, is not an isolated case. The statistics speak of around 19,000 adults who were born in Denmark but are not Danish citizens and almost 55,000 minors who are heading towards this situation. In both categories, around 60 percent are people from countries classified as “non-Western”.
State sets high hurdles
Like 29-year-old Nadia Matoussi, daughter of Tunisian immigrants. She was born in Aarhus, where she now runs a beauty salon and is also studying business administration at a technical college. After graduating from secondary school, she thought she had fulfilled an important criterion for a settlement permit: a three-year apprenticeship. But she was wrong, because the school holidays were not counted. She completed additional training and internships, but it was never enough to meet the strict requirements, namely training or working full-time for a prescribed period of time.
It is grotesque to have grown up in a country that she considers her home and whose language she speaks, and yet not be recognized by a society to whose prosperity she contributes, Matoussi told broadcaster DR. Citizenship can they won’t get it for about six years; before she can apply for a settlement permit, she must first have worked full-time for three and a half years within four years. After a positive decision, a time-consuming procedure follows with sometimes difficult to understand hurdles until she can at best hold the Danish passport in her hands.
Naturalizations are complicated in many countries. And on the part of Danish politicians, it is explicitly said that getting a passport is not a right for immigrants, but a privilege that one has to work for. However, young people like Nadia Matoussi or Eldison Abulovic are unlucky to live in a time when Denmark has repeatedly tightened its naturalization practice. It made no difference whether it was a bourgeois or social-democratic government that held the scepter. Because a liberal migration policy in Denmark has long been a dead end.
In the case of national-conservative politicians, this line is not surprising. More so with the Social Democrats, who have also been pursuing them for several years. They justify this by saying that a comprehensive welfare state like the Danish one can only function if its services do not become a self-service shop for population groups that contribute little or nothing to the community. The Nordic welfare state is therefore not compatible with an open-door policy. And it is a core social democratic concern to protect it.
The argument is justified when one reads in the statistics how sluggishly the integration of certain “non-Western” immigrant groups in particular has progressed over the past few decades. But that doesn’t explain why Denmark is making life difficult for a group that corresponds exactly to the ideal of future citizens: socially integrated, fluent in the language, well educated, paying taxes. Just like Nadia Matoussi.
The Liberal Dilemma
So what should Danish migration policy look like so that the country doesn’t alienate the foreigners it actually wants? Especially since business associations have repeatedly complained that more workers are needed than Denmark’s population can currently offer.
It’s a complicated, multi-level problem, says Martin Agerup, director of the liberal Copenhagen think tank Cepos. For example, cheap labor from less affluent EU countries is a thorn in the side of some unions. At the same time, Agerup notes, the Danish economy would hardly function without them today. What is more important, however, is that the Danish population demands a high degree of acceptance of the liberal Danish social model from immigrants. However, there is a contradiction here – because liberal thinking must consequently mean standing up for open borders.
With today’s migration policy, says Agerup, there is far too much symbolism at play. But even if one has to admit that Muslim immigration has created certain problems, it is wrong to construct a threat to liberal democracy out of individuals. Making immigrants a “problem in itself” is not the same as talking about problems associated with immigration.
Agerup does not see immigration as a general threat to liberal democracy in Denmark. “That’s why we shouldn’t approach this from a position of weakness,” he says. “We have an attractive social model. The fact that people want to come to us is a signal of strength.”
State misses opportunities
Politics, however, is increasingly going in the opposite direction. Only to the left of the Social Democrats is there still resistance. There, the complicated procedure for obtaining citizenship is criticized as a Kafkaesque process with absurd rules that does not promote integration, but hinders it.
The state is thus giving up an opportunity to bring exactly those people on board who best match the desired profile of the “integrated immigrant”. Because science has shown that “secondos” from immigrant families are very often very good Danes. A survey by Aarhus University and the Statistical Office as part of a larger scientific investigation showed in 2018 that young people without Danish citizenship feel just as committed to the Danish state as their peers with a Danish passport.
However, it seems more important to the government to send out a “clear message” on the migration issue with extensive symbolic politics. Certain collateral damage is apparently accepted. It’s not just about the secondos, but also about Danish citizens who want to settle down in Denmark after a stay abroad with a non-European partner.
He was prominent Case of a Danish astrophysicist, whose American wife was denied the right of residence by the Danish administration – due to “the couple’s insufficient combined ties to the country”. With this “affiliation clause”, Denmark actually wants to make it more difficult for migrants to join their families.
As far as the secondos are concerned, a look at neighboring Sweden should be a clear warning for Copenhagen. There they are currently struggling with the consequences of a failed integration of the second generation of immigrants, which has been reflected in a worrying increase in gang crime in recent years.