Last week several friends and family forwarded me articles about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s trip to Denmark. How strange it was to see the headline news all about both my home and my year abroad destination. It certainly got my grandparents talking around their dinner table.
Suddenly everyone is talking about immigration, and the irony of this particular news story prompted me to write this article. As an (albeit temporary) immigrant myself on my year abroad in Copenhagen, I find the rhetoric surrounding this debate back home in the UK particularly misinformed.
The Home Secretary points to steadily declining net Danish immigration figures as an example of an immigration policy that works. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, said when she came into power in 2019 that she wanted to reduce the number of asylum seekers in Denmark to zero. As usual, politicians are only concerned with illegal immigrants, often conflating them with asylum seekers. They are not trying to remove me, a white British woman here with a European passport.
A closer look at the deterrence strategies immediately rings alarm bells. Frederiksen’s predecessor, Lars Rasmussen, made refugee status temporary in 2015, meaning that residence permits for refugees now only last for a maximum of two years, but refugees must wait eight years before they can apply for permanent status. Permanent status is another hurdle to stability; to achieve permanent status applicants must be fluent in Danish and have a full-time job. Family reunification is now harder in Denmark, and again requires passing a Danish language test and providing a financial guarantee.
Never mind the conflation of migration categories, the UK government’s fixation on the numbers obscures the means of achieving them. Migration does not stop at the border, and Denmark faces multitudes of issues with integration into Danish society.
The social consequences of this style of politics are traumatising. A notable example is Denmark’s so-called “ghetto law”, which grants the state the power to demolish apartment blocks where over half of residents have a “non-western” background. The language so deployed by Danish politicians reveals deep-rooted issues of ethnic nationalism and exceptionalism in Denmark, the equivalent seeds of which are now being sown in the UK.
Mahmood’s announcement of the changes to the UK’s asylum system is deeply disappointing. Several new policies are directly transplanted from the Danish system, such as reducing refugees’ leave to remain, removing the automatic right to family reunion, and seizing valuables from asylum seekers to contribute toward their accommodation costs in the UK.
Starmer and his government keep emphasising the cost to the taxpayer of Britain’s broken asylum system. But this hardline approach is not the answer and will only create wider social divisions at a time when unity and compassion is needed more than ever.
Out of everything our government has used taxpayer money for, from faulty PPE during the pandemic to the failure of HS2, providing support and safety for people more vulnerable than ourselves is not something that I have a problem with.
“Mette Frederiksen – July 2025” by European Parliament is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
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The UK Shouldn’t Emulate Denmark’s Immigration Policies: A Perspective from Copenhagen
Last week several friends and family forwarded me articles about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s trip to Denmark. How strange it was to see the headline news all about both my home and my year abroad destination. It certainly got my grandparents talking around their dinner table.
Suddenly everyone is talking about immigration, and the irony of this particular news story prompted me to write this article. As an (albeit temporary) immigrant myself on my year abroad in Copenhagen, I find the rhetoric surrounding this debate back home in the UK particularly misinformed.
The Home Secretary points to steadily declining net Danish immigration figures as an example of an immigration policy that works. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, said when she came into power in 2019 that she wanted to reduce the number of asylum seekers in Denmark to zero. As usual, politicians are only concerned with illegal immigrants, often conflating them with asylum seekers. They are not trying to remove me, a white British woman here with a European passport.
A closer look at the deterrence strategies immediately rings alarm bells. Frederiksen’s predecessor, Lars Rasmussen, made refugee status temporary in 2015, meaning that residence permits for refugees now only last for a maximum of two years, but refugees must wait eight years before they can apply for permanent status. Permanent status is another hurdle to stability; to achieve permanent status applicants must be fluent in Danish and have a full-time job. Family reunification is now harder in Denmark, and again requires passing a Danish language test and providing a financial guarantee.
Never mind the conflation of migration categories, the UK government’s fixation on the numbers obscures the means of achieving them. Migration does not stop at the border, and Denmark faces multitudes of issues with integration into Danish society.
The social consequences of this style of politics are traumatising. A notable example is Denmark’s so-called “ghetto law”, which grants the state the power to demolish apartment blocks where over half of residents have a “non-western” background. The language so deployed by Danish politicians reveals deep-rooted issues of ethnic nationalism and exceptionalism in Denmark, the equivalent seeds of which are now being sown in the UK.
Mahmood’s announcement of the changes to the UK’s asylum system is deeply disappointing. Several new policies are directly transplanted from the Danish system, such as reducing refugees’ leave to remain, removing the automatic right to family reunion, and seizing valuables from asylum seekers to contribute toward their accommodation costs in the UK.
Starmer and his government keep emphasising the cost to the taxpayer of Britain’s broken asylum system. But this hardline approach is not the answer and will only create wider social divisions at a time when unity and compassion is needed more than ever.
Out of everything our government has used taxpayer money for, from faulty PPE during the pandemic to the failure of HS2, providing support and safety for people more vulnerable than ourselves is not something that I have a problem with.
“Mette Frederiksen – July 2025” by European Parliament is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
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