“Immigration is the greatest threat to the Nordic region”, declared Mette Frederiksen in May 2025.
Many of her peers in parliament agree: Konservative opens their manifesto stating that “Denmark has received far too many foreigners over the past years who have proven difficult, if not impossible, to integrate”. Venstre thinks that “it is crucial that Denmark does not become an attractive destination for asylum seekers” and they want to “take stronger action against the serious terrorist threat against Denmark”. Liberal Alliance’s action plan stems from the “terrorist risks, social tensions, economic challenges, crime, and cultural consequences” that immigration brings.
All of them are concerned with parallel societies, violence, impact on welfare and the erosion of Danish values. Their rhetoric, shamelessly linking terrorism to immigration, makes it look as though migrants come to Denmark to commit crime and abuse the welfare state, and that Denmark is at the edge of an economic and cultural collapse because of it. They don’t seem to remember that not long ago it was Danes moving overseas.
Never in human history has there been a factory of (often illegal) emigrants as big as Europe. Between 1815 and 1930 about 65 million people left Europe, including over 300,000 Danes —about 15% of the total population at the time— that fled to the United States between 1870 and 1920 alone.
The main reason was Denmark’s tyendeloven of 1854, which legally bound agricultural laborers and domestic servants to the heads of their households, subjecting them to harsh penalties for breaking work contracts. Employers could dismiss workers immediately on a wide range of grounds and disobedience was of course illegal. With no realistic path to improving their social and economic status in Denmark, the promise of cheap land in the American Midwest made these farmers the primary drivers of the emigration wave.
The letters that these emigrants sent to their relatives back in Denmark were published later in the newspapers along with advice for starting a new life in the US, which stirred a lot of excitement locally. Executing the plan was not easy, though. A one-way ticket on a steamship would cost almost a year’s wages, so it took farmers years to save up for it. At the beginning they would settle in cities like New York and Philadelphia, but the westward expansion opened up new possibilities. Danes started to settle in big numbers near each other in Wisconsin —in towns named “West Denmark” and “New Denmark”— and then Utah, where Danes were the 2nd largest immigrant group by 1900.
They kept emigrating for the first half of the 20th century, until economic growth in the aftermath of WWII began to reverse the trend. Short on labor, Denmark signed formal recruitment agreements with Turkey, Yugoslavia and Pakistan in the 1960s and early 70s. Around 25.000 work permits were issued in just a few short years before the late 70s inflationary crisis, when Denmark put a hard stop to immigration.
The original intent was for them to work for a few years and return home. However, once the indvandringsstop was put in place, workers realized that if they left Denmark, they would never be allowed back in.
This is one of the reasons for which a tight immigration policy is typically not effective. When people can freely come and go, they actually come and go. This was the case for example between Spain and Morocco during the 1980s, before the Schengen visa rules. But when the cost of entry is so high, there is a strong incentive to never leave again and resort to family reunification laws instead. Proof of it is that around 75% of the current Turkish and Pakistani population in Denmark entered through family reunification.
Nevertheless during that initial wave nobody complained much about foreign workers staying in Denmark permanently. The crusade on immigration started later, in the early 1990s, fearing a large-scale arrival of asylum seekers from Yugoslavia. This continued through the 2000s —following the 2001 election in which Dansk Folkeparti gained significant influence— the cause of concern this time being the Middle East. The political panic reached its peak in 2015 with the mass migration of Syrian refugees, which triggered a barrage of laws like the border checks with Germany, the infamous “Jewellery Law” and other measures. Thirty years of anti-immigration rhetoric culminated with Mette Frederiksen’s paradigm shift in 2019, in which the Social Democrats adopted the language of the far right to not repeat the results of 18 years earlier.
This is, in a nutshell, the perception of migrants in the 21st century, where we’re seemingly faced with an unprecedented migration crisis every 4 years. But every single person that has ever moved abroad knows one simple truth: people move in search of better life opportunities or to be near their loved ones. This was the case a century ago when Danes were migrating to the US and this is the case now, it is the case for Syrian refugees and for EU white collar workers, for rural-to-urban migration and cross-border migration, for students and for families.
Driven by demand
Politicians tend to ignore the important fact that migration is primarily a response to labor demands. The correlation between immigration and unemployment is very weak, but negative. This means that immigration goes up during times of high growth, and goes down during economic downturns (media only reports when it goes up, don’t they?).
Perhaps counterintuitively, this means that making tighter rules won’t make immigration stop, it will just make the immigrant experience more miserable. To give just one example, for the last 30 years Denmark has championed one of the stricter migration policies in Europe, while Portugal has one of most open ones. Today ~14% of Denmark’s population is foreign born compared to ~12% of Portugal’s. The interesting thing is that the difference in absolute numbers has stayed roughly the same since 1900 in spite of their radically opposing policies.
Conversely, “opening the gates”, while not realistic due to the political cost, wouldn’t cause an instant massive influx of migrants either, as much as they want the electorate to believe. With the EU expansion of 2007 many northern countries, afraid of an “avalanche” of Romanian and Bulgarian workers, closed the doors for up to 7 years, so they emigrated to the few countries that were completely open like Spain and Italy. Do you know what happened?
Nothing. Some established permanently, some worked for a bit and moved elsewhere. No economic or cultural collapse, no doom of any type. Countries have a much larger capacity than many believe because migrants don’t just take jobs; they also buy houses, consume services, pay taxes and contribute to society. In short, migrants generate more jobs too.
Migrants also don’t move to “impose” their culture. They might, for example, open foreign food restaurants, and if they succeed it’s only because locals like them: multiculturalism exists because it is socially accepted, not imposed. There is no evidence that multiculturalism undermines social cohesion, nor is there any trade-off between ethnic diversity and prosperity: one just needs to look at countries like Australia or Canada for great examples of that. In fact successful integration occurs more often when the host country is more welcoming of diverse foreign identities: it is arguably hard for people to square the message that “you must assimilate in order to belong” with the one of “you can’t be one of us, Danish-ness is a gift”.
Good and bad migrants
A recurring counter-argument is the overrepresentation of foreigners in crime, citing for example the case of gang violence in Sweden. But it is well documented that crime is not a function of nationality, rather, one of social class. The problem is not this or that “problematic” country, it is inequality and structural discrimination. As it happens, Denmark is one the European countries with highest wealth inequality, while Sweden is the highest.
Denmark and Sweden can also be criticized for decades of poor urban planning. Cheap political promises of affordable social housing led to the construction of small, ugly concrete blocks of apartments in underdeveloped green zones far away from everything. These neighborhoods are places where no one wants to live, so they become the last resort and often only available option for low status migrants.
The so-called parallel societies don’t materialize out of thin air, they are effectively planned for, albeit unwillingly so. As migration expert Hein de Haas points out, “clustering can advance integration, because community life can empower disadvantaged minorities”, but if the first-generation of migrants does not manage to succeed due to bureaucratic difficulties, discrimination, or a lack of social capital —all far too common issues— the second-generation might find itself stuck without any prospects of a better future, and of course that might pose a problem for the society, of which violence is the ultimate consequence.
Yet if we are to talk about overrepresentation in national statistics, then we can’t skip talking about overrepresentation in entrepreneurship, with migrants accounting for 17% of all self-employed individuals in OECD countries, including Denmark. This reality comes in two flavors: the one of highly skilled workers capitalizing on tech niches, and the one of small businesses in food, retail, transport, etc.
This shouldn’t be too surprising. Moving abroad is difficult and risky, especially for those coming from outside the EU. It takes significant willpower, resources and risk tolerance; migrants are unlikely to be a negative selection of the population of their origin countries. Not in Denmark, not elsewhere. As Ian Goldin showed in the book Exceptional People, migrants have fueled the engine of human progress throughout our entire history.
The trap is thinking that there are “good” migrants and “bad” migrants. There is no such a thing as good and bad migration. People do not migrate to commit crime nor to abuse the welfare state; there is no evidence of such a thing as a “welfare magnet”. If that were true, how come the United States is currently the most attractive destination in the world for workers of all social classes? The boring truth is that the net fiscal impact of immigration normally lies within the ±1% of the GDP of a given country, including the social welfare expenditure by stay-at-home relatives. Leaving Frederiksen’s claim that “immigration is the greatest threat to the Nordic region” unsupported.
The categorization of people into “good” and “bad” based on their origin —with some political parties proposing an official list of “difficult” countries to legislate the matter— is at the very definition of institutional xenophobia under the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In fact, the European Court of Justice ruled last year that using the “non-Western immigrant” label to evict residents constitutes discrimination based on ethnic origin.
Part of why this “good migrant / bad migrant” attitude is so prevalent in Denmark is because Denmark only became an attractive destination fairly recently. There is a paradox in that anti-immigration sentiment tends to be strongest in places with little immigration, as countries with a longer multicultural history are more receptive to it because they learn to see it as normal.
That is the most important change that Denmark is missing: to see immigration as a normal part of the society, as they did a century ago when newspapers cheerfully reported on the adventures of Danish emigrants. At the time Danes integrated relatively quickly into American society while preserving their own identity, having established Danish language newspapers, Lutheran churches and Danish folk schools. Their success was facilitated by a country that was generally receptive to Scandinavian migration, however, during and after WWI, rising patriotism fueled pressure for cultural conformity and increased hostility toward immigrants. Several states restricted or banned the use of foreign languages in schools, churches and public life, until in 1924 the U.S. adopted strict national-origin quotas based on pseudo-science theories to preserve American ethnic homogeneity and make their home a “vastly better place to live in”. Many Danes had to either return to Europe —a formidable endeavor— or give up on their cultural identity, something which did eventually happen.
We can’t compare that scenario to the current reality, but the example serves to illustrate that good migration and bad migration is not a new idea, and that public perception might change sharply depending on the prevailing economic circumstances.
In the end, to be in favor or against immigration is a bit like being in favor or against the economy, or being in favor or against the climate. As Ronald Skeldon says in his book Migration and Development, “Migration is development”. Migration is and always has been a complex reality driven by people’s desire to have a better life. It is up to each of us to make the best of that reality, to accept it and to perhaps even welcome it.
