The Danish Immigration Lesson

What happens when a country with a long history of tolerance toward immigration and refugees has had enough? What happens when false asylum claims come to predominate, when immigrants resist assimilation? What happens when left-leaning politicians go too far in protecting the rights of immigrants and not far enough in assuring the rights of citizens?

You get Denmark. These are the real lessons for America in what happened to immigration and asylum policy there, showing immigration is a governance problem, not a moral abstraction.

Between 2019 and 2023, Denmark ushered in what is known domestically as the paradigm shift (paradigmeskiftet). The policy framework prioritized return of asylees and temporary rather than permanent protection when asylum was granted. In 2021, Denmark became the first European Union country to revoke Syrian refugees’ residency by claiming parts of Syria were safe to return to. The Danes reframed the debate and prompted a rethinking of mass immigration into Western Europe.

For years, Denmark was considered the EU’s black sheep of migration policy. In the aftermath of the 2015–2016 Syrian migration crisis (driven in large part by the Obama administration’s misdeeds in that country), Denmark adopted increasingly restrictive rules to deter arrivals. The key event was in 2019, when Denmark approved its paradigm shift law that made temporary protection for refugees the new norm. Permanent residence was eventually still available, but subject to, among other criteria, full-time, stable employment.

By limiting the duration of asylum (in the U.S. and most of Europe, a grant of asylum is indefinite), Danish authorities made it easier to check whether the grounds of protection were still applicable and, if not, whether deportation was feasible. Residence permits of hundreds of Syrian refugees were revoked. In 2021, Denmark signed a memorandum of understanding with Rwanda, under which the Danes would transfer asylum-seekers to a reception center in the African nation to wait for their applications, a kind of outsourcing strategy. Denmark later backed away from the plan under intense outside criticism.