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Home / World

Denmark poised to block path to citizenship for migrants from Muslim nations

By Richard Orange
Daily Telegraph UK·
21 Feb, 2021 09:50 PM5 mins to read

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The socially progressive Scandinavian nation is moving further to the right on immigration. Photo / 123RF

The socially progressive Scandinavian nation is moving further to the right on immigration. Photo / 123RF

Jino Victoria Doabi's voice cracks as she describes the bidding war between Denmark's political parties to make it harder for those born abroad to become citizens.

"It makes me feel that I'm not worth anything," she sobs. "I study at the finest university in Denmark and I study the hardest of everyone, and I work hard to improve democracy too, and still this is nothing - just because of where I was born."

In most respects, Denmark is a socially progressive Scandinavian nation, with low levels of inequality, generous welfare benefits and liberal views on gender equality.

However, the influence of the Right-wing Danish People's Party over the past 20 years has pushed even the supposedly centrist Social Democratic and Liberal parties to positions more associated with populists such as Donald Trump.

For immigrants like Doabi, who used to be described in more welcoming times as "New Danes", the country is feeling less and less like home. Despite living in Denmark since the age of 11, Doabi, 28, whose parents were atheist Kurdish refugees from Iran, has yet to gain citizenship.

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And if a new proposal from the populist New Right Party and Danish People's Party wins the backing of the parties of the centre-Right and centre-Left, she perhaps never will.

The New Right's proposal would split those eligible for citizenship into two groups - those from largely Muslim areas such as the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and those from elsewhere.

It would mean that when parliament comes to vote on its biannual citizenship bill, MPs would be able to vote through one group but not the other.

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"It's just common sense," says Mette Thiesen, the New Right's citizenship spokesman.

"There are specific countries that we have had very bad experiences with: a lot of them have got citizenship in the past 40 years, and we can see in the statistics that both the citizens of these countries and their children are more criminal."

It's not just the populists. Under its new leader, Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democrats have swung decisively to the Right on immigration and won large numbers of working-class voters back from the Danish People's Party. They have also grabbed the attention of ailing left-of-centre parties across Europe.

"For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and free movement of labour is paid by the lower classes," Frederiksen wrote in the run-up to the 2019 election.

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During the campaign, her party called for a cap on "non-western immigrants" and has called for those seeking asylum in the EU to wait for a decision at a camp in North Africa.

It was the Social Democrats who last year began the inter-party talks on tightening citizenship with a proposal to make it harder for convicted criminals to become citizens while those convicted of terrorism, gang crime and rape would be banned.

🇩🇰In Denmark, 41-year-old Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen runs a minority government.

Technically center-left, she has adopted a tough anti-immigration stance to win https://t.co/cFE7mJNnUA pic.twitter.com/XsEqfPRTFe

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) December 11, 2019

Even now, Denmark's strict citizenship rules require that to be eligible, Doabi must, among other things, pass a Danish language test, sign an affidavit that she respects Danish values, and work an average of 30 hours a week for three and a half years after graduating from Copenhagen University.

The Liberal Party has also called for each applicant to have to answer five questions on Danish values, stating formally, for instance, that they agree women should be able to freely chose their romantic partners. It also wants applicants to submit a cover letter explaining why they want to become Danish, and to undergo an in-person interview to double-check that they have the right thoughts and ideas.

"Good behaviour alone is not enough. If you want to be a Danish citizen, you must have taken Denmark in," Morten Dahlin, the Liberal Party citizenship spokesman, told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Susi Meret, an associate professor at Aalborg University, described the talks as "a mainstreaming of positions which 20 years ago were seen as very much belonging to the populist Right".

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The only parties pushing in the other direction are the small, minority parties of the centre and Left, such as the Social Liberal Party for which Doabi is standing as a citizen representative in Copenhagen.

"It was a quite different country I came to. It was open, they loved us, they gave us everything they could to become members of society," said Doabi.

"I never, ever in my entire life imagined I would be facing racism like this, and facing it every day."

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