How Denmark closed the asylum route, and kept its politics calm

Only 1,500 people applied for asylum in Denmark in 2020. That was a 57 per cent drop on the year before and the lowest number since the 1990s. In the same year Sweden, next door, recorded 13,000 claims.

Denmark did not arrive at those numbers by accident, and not under a hard-right government. The policy was built and is defended by the Social Democrats, the party of the Danish centre-left. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has set a target of zero people arriving in Denmark outside the UN resettlement system. In most of Europe that sentence would be read out as an accusation. In Denmark it is the political centre.

How the consensus formed

Denmark was the first country to sign and ratify the UN Refugee Convention in 1951, and for decades it ran a comparatively open system with strong protections for asylum seekers. That began to change in the 1990s, as the effects of sustained migration were felt and the Danish People's Party pushed the issue into the mainstream. A conclusion took hold across the spectrum: the Danish welfare state depends on a high-trust society, and protecting it meant controlling who joins it.

What had been called far-right rhetoric became, within two decades, the shared position of nearly every party in parliament, because Danish voters made clear they would support nothing else.

The laws

The refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 turned the talking points into statute.

• In 2015 parliament created a temporary protection status that can be withdrawn when conditions in a home country improve even slightly, separating people fleeing war from those who have settled permanently.
• In 2016 the state gave authorities the power to confiscate valuables from new arrivals to fund the cost of their stay, one of the most criticised laws in recent Danish history, and one that survived that criticism.
• The so-called anti-ghetto laws set limits on the concentration of non-Western residents in designated neighbourhoods, on the argument that integration fails past a certain density.
• A 2021 law, passed 70 votes to 24, allows Denmark to transfer asylum seekers to a third country outside Europe while their claims are processed.

In the past three years Denmark has accepted fewer than 250 refugees through the UN resettlement route, each selected and vetted on humanitarian criteria. The government's stated goal is not zero asylum. It is zero arrivals outside official channels.

The opt-out that makes it legal

Why can Denmark do what other member states cannot? Because in 1992 Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty, and the price of getting them to say yes a year later was the Edinburgh Agreement: a package of opt-outs, including one covering justice and home affairs. Denmark is simply not bound by most EU asylum rules. The policies Copenhagen passes would be illegal in Berlin or Dublin, not because those countries' voters oppose them, but because the treaty framework their governments signed forbids them.

That is the uncomfortable core of the Danish case. The variable is not public opinion, which looks similar across much of Europe. The variable is whether a national parliament is allowed to act on it.

The pushback from above

The criticism has come almost entirely from supranational institutions rather than from Danish voters. The European Commission objected to the third-country transfer law. The UN Committee against Torture raised concerns over transfers to countries such as Rwanda, two weeks after the UK Supreme Court blocked Britain's own Rwanda scheme. Human Rights Watch called the Danish approach racist, duplicitous and hypocritical. Denmark's immigration minister called that characterisation offensive and lacking the seriousness the subject requires.

The Danish electorate, for its part, has kept returning the governments that built the system.

What the rest of Europe is taking from it

More than five million migrants entered the EU in 2023, and reception systems across the continent are at capacity. Governments that spent years condemning Copenhagen are now studying it. German policymakers cite Denmark as the model for effective returns, and Berlin has tightened its own deportation laws after years in which rejected claims rarely led to removals. The offshore-processing idea that was treated as unthinkable when Denmark legislated it is now openly discussed in Brussels.

Not every Danish policy is replicable, because the opt-out is not. But the direction is unmistakable, and it raises the question the rest of Europe has so far avoided answering: if these policies command majorities almost everywhere, what exactly is the mechanism by which they remain impossible almost everywhere?

First published as a video essay on 30 May 2024. The written edition has been lightly edited for the page.