country:denmark

Immigration to Denmark from UAE
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/immigration-to-denmark-from-uae

Immigration to Denmark from UAE Let Permits and Visas help you grab the opportunities and advantages of Denmark’s opportunities. Denmark is a Northern European country and is less populated compared to other countries in the Europe. More and more people are considering Denmark as it has growing needs for skilled migrants and is open for […]

Denmark Immigration Information
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/denmark-immigration-information

Denmark Immigration Information To make it more competitive and contribute to Denmark’s economy, Denmark has implemented many Immigration programs to attract foreign migrants who are skilled and has the qualification to work in the country. The most popular among the programs is the Danish Green Card Scheme which is a points based system and scores […]

Work in Denmark with Danish Green Card
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Work in Denmark with Danish Green Card Denmark is considered one of the richest countries in the world and it is also popularly known to have a high standard of living and has a very low unemployment rate. That is why more and more people are wanting to migrate to Denmark to have a better […]

Denmark, a social welfare utopia, takes a nasty turn on refugees

COPENHAGEN — Lise Ramslog was out for a barefoot amble on the warm day last September that Europe’s refugee crisis came to her remote village in southern Denmark.

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/denmark-a-social-welfare-utopia-takes-a-nasty-turn-on-refugees/2016/04/11/a652e298-f5d1-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html?postshare=1851460698
#Danemark #réfugiés #asile #migrations

Denmark Residence and Work Permit
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Denmark Residence and Work Permit To be able to work in Denmark and live there, you will be needing a residence and work permit. And your work permit and residence visa application will be depending on your qualifications. There are a number of Denmark Immigration Schemes designed for qualified skilled workers and professionals to apply […]

Criteria For Danish Green Card
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/criteria-for-danish-green-card

Criteria For Danish Green Card Denmark’s Danish Green Card will allow you to obtain a Residence Permit and look for work and live in Denmark. The Denmark Green Card is granted on the basis of the applicant’s score based on the evaluation. If you have been granted a Residence Visa under the Danish Green Card, […]

Denmark Work Permit or Visa
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/denmark-work-permit-or-visa

Denmark Work Permit or Visa In a lot of cases, international immigrants have to acquire a residence and a work permit before they will be allowed to work in the country and in other cases, foreign migrants can actually join work related activities while on a visa in Denmark without residence or work permit. If […]

Immigration to Denmark
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/immigration-to-denmark

Immigration to Denmark Permits and Visas is proud to have assisted thousands of professionals to migrate to Denmark to work and live. Denmark’s doors are open to professionals from the Middle East because of the need for more than 30,000 professionals including civil engineers, IT professionals, architects, nurses and people who are experts in business […]

Puisqu’on parle des #Vikings …

Vikings suffered from massive intestinal WORM infestations | Daily Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3432259/Vikings-suffered-massive-intestinal-WORM-infestations-Researchers-say-p

Massive intestinal worm infestations that led to Vikings developing protection against disease has left descendants predisposed to emphysema and other lung conditions. 

Archaeological excavations of Viking latrine pits in Denmark have revealed that 2,000 years ago, populations suffered massive infestations.

The way that their genes developed to protect their vital organs from disease caused by worms has become the inherited trait which can now lead to lung disease in smokers, the team found.
[…]
The team examined 1,000 year old parasite eggs recovered from Viking feces, which indicated both the Vikings and their domestic animals were plagued by parasites, reported ScienceNordic.
The eggs were found in soil samples from a latrine in a Norseman settlement near Viborg, Denmark, during 1018 to 1030.
Researchers extracted DNA from the eggs and by sequencing the DNA, they were able to decipher what species the eggs came from and if it infected humans.
Roundworm and human whipworm were found, along with liver fluke from cattle or sheep.
DNA sequencing of the parasite eggs can reveal information about the people who spread the parasites, according to researchers.
Vikings weren’t the only ones to pass along infected by parasitic worms.
Earlier this month, new research found the number of intestinal parasites such as whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica dysentery did not decrease as expected in Roman times - and actually increased from Iron Age levels.
Researchers from Cambridge gathered evidence of parasites in ancient latrines, human burials and ’coprolites’ - or fossilised faeces - as well as in combs and textiles from numerous Roman Period excavations across the Roman Empire.
Not only did certain intestinal parasites appear to increase in prevalence with the coming of the Romans, but Mitchell also found that, despite their famous culture of regular bathing, ’ectoparasites’ such as lice and fleas were just as widespread among Romans as in Viking and medieval populations, where bathing was not widely practiced.
Some excavations revealed evidence for special combs to strip lice from hair, and delousing may have been a daily routine for many people living across the Roman Empire .

Vers intestinaux : ascaris et trichures
mais aussi, douve du foie

ISIS And Violent Extremism : Is The West’s Counter-Narrative Making The Problem Worse ?
▻http://influence.cipr.co.uk/2015/06/25/isis-violent-extremism-wests-counter-narrative-making-problem-wors

La moitié raisin d’un article mi-figue ("we need a psychological approach")

The Islamist ideology is weak, the concept of an ummah is notional to all but a few, and the ideology is rejected and ignored by all but a tiny fraction of extremists throughout the (very diverse) Muslim world. Where we do see a degree of what our politicians and media construe as mainstream support for ISIS or al Qaeda, is rooted in opposition to Western Middle East policy in respect of, say, the invasion of Iraq, the protection of Israel and the plight of Palestinians, inaction in Syria, or support for corrupt ruling oligarchies.

However, European national leaderships in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and Sweden continue to focus heavily on Islam and the ideologies of violent extremist movements to sustain a counter-argument that cannot win on rational grounds – because it mistakes appearance for reality, content for substance, emotion for reason.

When the counter-narrative fails to get results it becomes shriller and makes the problem worse. And problem is compounded by an insistence that European Muslims condemn terrorism – which serves only to entrench the Islamization of the problem.

As a consequence, here in Europe, our politics are becoming inflamed, our counter-narrative is handing ammunition to the Far Right, Islamophobia is on the increase, and tension is rising in communities. Our police and our publics are beguiled by the nature, volume and dexterity of the ISIS propaganda machine and there is insufficient understanding of the nature of the battle we are fighting.

We are not thinking about the realities of brands, of ideologies and of mindsets – about what actually motivates terrorists.

Denmark Visa
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/denmark-visa

Denmark Visa Denmark is one of the countries in the European Union and one of its most active members when it comes to recruiting skilled workers from all over the world. The immigration policy of Denmark, which is similar to that of the United Kingdom skilled migrant program, uses a point-based system that is referred […]

Denmark Green Card Scheme
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/denmark-green-card-scheme

Denmark Green Card Scheme Under the Denmark Green Card Scheme visa, all successful applicants are eligible for a Denmark work visa and are free to migrate to Denmark. The work visa is valid for 3 years only, after which an application can be submitted for permanent residency in Denmark. This scheme is the same with […]

APM Terminals to operate new automated port in Morocco’s Tangier | Agricultural Commodities | Reuters
▻http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL5N1725K4

The world’s third largest port operator APM Terminals said it will invest 758 million euros ($858.3 million) in a new transhipment terminal in Tangier, Morocco, that will be the first automated terminal in Africa.

The new container terminal will have an annual capacity of five million 20-foot equivalent units (TEU), and APM Terminals has the right to operate the port for 30 years.

APM Terminals, a unit of Denmark’s shipping and oil group A.P. Moller-Maersk, is currently operating a port facility in Tangier that handled 1.7 million TEUs in 2015.

A.P. Moller-Maersk also controls the world’s largest container shipping company, Maersk Line and it has committed to use the new facilities.
[…]
Tangier is the second-busiest container port on the African continent after Port Said, Egypt and the location of Tangier provides a natural transhipment location for containers carrying anything from flat-screen televisions to sportswear from Asia to Europe and Africa.

After Return: documenting the experiences of young people forcibly removed to #Afghanistan

2,018 young men who spent their formative teenage years in the UK care system have been sent back to Afghanistan over the past 9 years, often to very precarious and dangerous situations.

Since March 2014, RSN has been systematically monitoring what happens to former child asylum seekers who have been forcibly removed to Afghanistan after turning 18.
After Return documents their experiences and, for the first time, fills a vital evidence gap in their education, employment, health and wellbeing outcomes.

https://refugeesupportnetwork.org/sites/default/files/images/rsz_rsn_report-youth_on_the_move-v2-coveronly.jpg

#réfugiés_afghans #renvoi #asile #migrations #réfugiés #expulsion

Méchants coups de pinces dans le panier de crabes : les Turcs balancent des infos compromettantes sur le comportement étonnant des Européens et l’exportation si facile de leurs jihadistes vers la Syrie.

Turkish officials : Europe wanted to export extremists to Syria
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/25/turkish-officials-europe-wanted-to-export-extremists-to-syria

Turkish officials have accused European governments of attempting to export their Islamic extremist problem to Syria, saying the EU has failed to secure its own borders or abide by pledges to share intelligence and cooperate in fighting the jihadist threat.

The failures were outlined by Turkish officials to the Guardian through several documented instances of foreign fighters leaving Europe while travelling on passports registered on Interpol watchlists, arriving from European airports with luggage containing weapons and ammunition, and being freed after being deported from Turkey despite warnings that they have links to foreign fighter networks.

[…]

In interviews with the Guardian, Turkish officials challenged the assessment that they did not do enough to combat the terror threat, and provided details of several incidents they say show European governments allowed people to travel to Turkey.

In June 2014, Turkish security officers at Istanbul airport interviewed a Norwegian man who openly told them that he had come to Turkey in order to travel to Syria for “jihad”. Isis had just surged through Iraq, conquering the plains of Nineveh, and would soon announce a caliphate on its territories in Syria and Iraq, upending fragile nation states that had already begun to collapse.

When they searched his luggage, they found that he had managed to travel out of Oslo with a suitcase that contained a camouflage outfit, a first aid kit, knives, a gun magazine and parts of an AK-47, the contents of which had managed to elude customs authorities in Europe.

Two months later, a German man arrived in Istanbul with a suitcase containing a bulletproof vest, military camouflage and binoculars that he managed to carry through an airport in Paris on his way to Turkey.

In 2013, A Danish-Turkish dual citizen, Fatih Khan, left Denmark for Syria, but was detained while trying to cross the border in the Turkish province of Kilis and deported back to Copenhagen. He was given another passport by the Danish authorities, and made his way back to Syria.

That same year, Mohamed Haroon Saleem, a British citizen, arrived in Istanbul from London and travelled to Syria, having managed to travel out of the UK with a passport that was flagged on the Interpol list as stolen or lost.

Mohamed Mehdi Raouafi, a French citizen, left France in January of 2014 to join the war in Syria. Despite his sister warning the Turkish authorities who subsequently informed the French government that he was going there to join radical groups, he was allowed to travel out of France.

Why Denmark Danish Green Card is Great
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/why-denmark-danish-green-card-is-great

Why Denmark Danish Green Card is Great Denmark is a happy country and is most sought out for immigration by the skilled workers. Denmark is known to provide a healthy and quality life style along with advanced health and educational system. One can easily maintain a work and life balance. English being the corporate language […]

Danish children’s rights activist fined for people trafficking

Lisbeth Zornig says her fine for giving a lift to family of Syrians is ‘criminalising decency’ amid asylum clampdown in Denmark

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9a77a77c241b71a3024a816e1e1925718790f135/0_397_3264_1958/master/3264.jpg?w=620&q=20&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&dpr=2&s=19a0f8a8aaef83ac272db9dfc4f9f38e

Know More About Denmark Residence And Work Visa
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/know-more-about-denmark-residence-and-work-visa

Know More About Denmark Residence And Work Visa Denmark is a beautiful place to work and getting a Denmark work permit or a Denmark visa is very easy to do by contacting a consultancy firm. But before you arrive in Denmark to work, it is important that you find out whether you are required to […]

Maersk Tankers to Use Drones to Slash Costs | World Maritime News
▻http://worldmaritimenews.com/archives/185047/maersk-tankers-to-use-drones-to-slash-costs

Maersk Tankers, part of Danish Maersk Group, has resorted to using drones to cut costs for deliveries at sea and has completed the first test drone delivery of urgent parcels to a vessel at sea near Kalundborg in Denmark.

With the first delivery completed in late January, further tests will now follow before the new drones can become a part of the company’s supply chain. The savings would be achieved as time and costs for urgent parcels delivery to vessels and vessel inspections would be reduced as the company would not need barges any more.

In addition, the use of drones would simplify the overall delivery process as predicting of tankers’ next ports of call can be complicated.

“Costs for a barge are on average USD 1,000 and can easily go up to USD 3,000 or more. With the current pay-load of drones, on average a vessel has 3 cases per year in which the barge transport could be substituted by a drone – meaning a potential avoidance of barge costs of USD 3,000-9,000 per vessel per year. And if you consider that Maersk Tankers has around 100 vessels, the savings potential could be substantial,” says Markus Kuhn, Supply Chain Manager at Maersk.

The drone used for the test was from the French company Xamen and ATEX approved (zone 2). Due to bad weather conditions, it was not possible to launch the drone from the shore as planned, but the parcel was instead successfully dropped from 5m onto the vessel after having flown in from a tugboat. The test took place at Kalundborg and was approved by Danish authorities, the company said.

Denmark Visa or Work Permit
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/denmark-visa-or-work-permit

Denmark Visa or Work Permit? In most cases, foregoing nationals need to have a residence and work permit before they can start working in a country. In some cases though, foreign nationals can perform a number of work-related activities while in Denmark (on a Denmark visa), without having to hold a residence and work permit. […]

Know Which Type of Denmark Visa Is For You
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/know-which-type-of-denmark-visa-is-for-you

Know Which Type of Denmark Visa Is For You ABOUT DENMARK The kingdom Denmark is located inside Northern Europe, a peninsula of Germany, neighboring within the west the North Sea, into the north Skagerrak and within the east the aroma along with Baltic Sea. Subsequently to the two huge islands Sjaelland moreover entertaining in attendance […]

Liberal, Harsh Denmark
Hugh Eakin

http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/eakin_1-031016.jpg

A cartoon published by the Danish newspaper Politiken showing Inger Støjberg, the country’s integration minister, lighting candles on a Christmas tree that has a dead asylum-­seeker as an ornament, December 2015
Anne-Marie Steen Petersen

1.
In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters have brought to power a right-wing party whose leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and “various types of parasites” to Europe. In France’s regional elections in December, some Socialist candidates withdrew at the last minute to support the conservatives and prevent the far-right National Front from winning. Even Germany, which took in more than a million asylum-seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of North African origin.
And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of 5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation. Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost its entire Jewish population.
When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable. In last June’s Danish national election—months before the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe—the debate centered around whether the incumbent, center-left Social Democrats or their challengers, the center-right Liberal Party, were tougher on asylum-seekers. The main victor was the Danish People’s Party, a populist, openly anti-immigration party, which drew 21 percent of the vote, its best performance ever. Its founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, for years known for suggesting that Muslims “are at a lower stage of civilization,” is now speaker of the Danish parliament. With the backing of the Danish People’s Party, the center-right Liberals formed a minority government that has taken one of the hardest lines on refugees of any European nation.
When I arrived in Copenhagen last August, the new government, under Liberal Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, had just cut social benefits to refugees by 45 percent. There was talk among Danish politicians and in the Danish press of an “invasion” from the Middle East—though the influx at the time was occurring in the Greek islands, more than one thousand miles away. In early September, Denmark began taking out newspaper ads in Lebanon and Jordan warning would-be asylum-seekers not to come. And by November, the Danish government announced that it could no longer accept the modest share of one thousand refugees assigned to Denmark under an EU redistribution agreement, because Italy and Greece had lost control of their borders.
These developments culminated in late January of this year, when Rasmussen’s minister of integration, Inger Støjberg, a striking, red-headed forty-two-year-old who has come to represent the government’s aggressive anti-refugee policies, succeeded in pushing through parliament an “asylum austerity” law that has gained notoriety across Europe. The new law, which passed with support from the Social Democrats as well as the Danish People’s Party, permits police to strip-search asylum-seekers and confiscate their cash and most valuables above 10,000 Danish kroner ($1,460) to pay for their accommodation; delays the opportunity to apply for family reunification by up to three years; forbids asylum-seekers from residing outside refugee centers, some of which are tent encampments; reduces the cash benefits they can receive; and makes it significantly harder to qualify for permanent residence. One aim, a Liberal MPexplained to me, is simply to “make Denmark less attractive to foreigners.”
Danish hostility to refugees is particularly startling in Scandinavia, where there is a pronounced tradition of humanitarianism. Over the past decade, the Swedish government has opened its doors to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians, despite growing social problems and an increasingly popular far-right party. But one of the things Danish leaders—and many Danes I spoke to—seem to fear most is turning into “another Sweden.” Anna Mee Allerslev, the top integration official for the city of Copenhagen, told me that the Danish capital, a Social Democratic stronghold with a large foreign-born population, has for years refused to take any refugees. (Under pressure from other municipalities, this policy is set to change in 2016.)
In part, the Danish approach has been driven by the country’s long experience with terrorism and jihadism. Nearly a decade before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015, and the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris in November, the publication of the so-called Muhammad cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had already turned Denmark into a primary target for extremists. Initially driven by a group of Danish imams, outcry against the cartoons gave strength to several small but radical groups among the country’s 260,000 Muslims. These groups have been blamed for the unusually large number of Danes—perhaps as many as three hundred or more—who have gone to fight in Syria, including some who went before the rise ofISIS in 2013. “The Danish system has pretty much been blinking red since 2005,” Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert who advises the PET, the Danish security and intelligence service, told me.
Since the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, the PET and other intelligence forces have disrupted numerous terrorist plots, some of them eerily foreshadowing what happened in Paris last year. In 2009, the Pakistani-American extremist David Headley, together with Laskar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani terrorist organization, devised a meticulous plan to storm the Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen and systematically kill all the journalists that could be found. Headley was arrested in the United States in October 2009, before any part of the plan was carried out; in 2013, he was sentenced by a US district court to thirty-five years in prison for his involvement in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
In February of last year, just weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a young Danish-Palestinian man named Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein tried to shoot his way into the Copenhagen meeting of a free-speech group to which a Swedish cartoonist, known for his caricatures of Muhammad, had been invited. El-Hussein succeeded in killing a Danish filmmaker at the meeting before fleeing the scene; then, hours later, he killed a security guard at the city’s main synagogue and was shot dead by police.
Yet many Danes I talked to are less concerned about terrorism than about the threat they see Muslims posing to their way of life. Though Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the population, there is growing evidence that many of the new arrivals fail to enter the workforce, are slow to learn Danish, and end up in high-crime immigrant neighborhoods where, while relying on extensive state handouts, they and their children are cut off from Danish society. In 2010, the Danish government introduced a “ghetto list” of such marginalized places with the goal of “reintegrating” them; the list now includes more than thirty neighborhoods.
Popular fears that the refugee crisis could overwhelm the Danish welfare state have sometimes surprised the country’s own leadership. On December 3, in a major defeat for the government, a clear majority of Danes—53 percent—rejected a referendum on closer security cooperation with the European Union. Until now, Denmark has been only a partial EU member—for example, it does not belong to the euro and has not joined EU protocols on citizenship and legal affairs. In view of the growing threat of jihadism, both the government and the opposition Social Democrats hoped to integrate the country fully into European policing and counterterrorism efforts. But the “no” vote, which was supported by the Danish People’s Party, was driven by fears that such a move could also give Brussels influence over Denmark’s refugee and immigration policies.
The outcome of the referendum has ominous implications for the European Union at a time when emergency border controls in numerous countries—including Germany and Sweden as well as Denmark—have put in doubt the Schengen system of open borders inside the EU. In Denmark itself, the referendum has forced both the Liberals and the Social Democrats to continue moving closer to the populist right. In November, Martin Henriksen, the Danish People’s Party spokesman on refugees and immigration, toldPolitiken, the country’s leading newspaper, “There is a contest on to see who can match the Danish People’s Party on immigration matters, and I hope that more parties will participate.”
2.
According to many Danes I met, the origins of Denmark’s anti-immigration consensus can be traced to the national election of November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks in the United States. At the time, the recently founded Danish People’s Party was largely excluded from mainstream politics; the incumbent prime minister, who was a Social Democrat, famously described the party as unfit to govern.
But during the 1990s, the country’s Muslim population had nearly doubled to around 200,000 people, and in the 2001 campaign, immigration became a central theme. The Social Democrats suffered a devastating defeat and, for the first time since 1924, didn’t control the most seats in parliament. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the ambitious leader of the victorious Liberal Party (no relation to the current prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen), made a historic decision to form a government with support from the Danish People’s Party, which had come in third place—a far-right alliance that had never been tried in Scandinavia. It kept Fogh Rasmussen in power for three terms.
From an economic perspective, the government’s embrace of the populist right was anomalous. With its unique combination of comprehensive welfare and a flexible labor market—known as flexicurity—Denmark has an efficient economy in which the rate of job turnover is one of the highest in Europe, yet almost 75 percent of working-age Danes are employed. At the same time, the country’s extraordinary social benefits, such as long-term education, retraining, and free child care, are based on integration in the workforce. Yet many of the qualities about the Danish system that work so well for those born into it have made it particularly hard for outsiders to penetrate.
Denmark is a mostly low-lying country consisting of the Jutland Peninsula in the west, the large islands of Funen and Zealand in the east, and numerous smaller islands. (It also includes the island of Greenland, whose tiny population is largely Inuit.) The modern state emerged in the late nineteenth century, following a series of defeats by Bismarck’s Germany in which it lost much of its territory and a significant part of its population. Several Danish writers have linked this founding trauma to a lasting national obsession with invasion and a continual need to assert danskhed, or Danishness.
Among other things, these preoccupations have given the Danish welfare system an unusually important part in shaping national identity. Visitors to Denmark will find the Danish flag on everything from public buses to butter wrappers; many of the country’s defining institutions, from its universal secondary education (Folkehøjskoler—the People’s High Schools) to the parliament (Folketinget—the People’s House) to the Danish national church (Folkekirken—the People’s Church) to the concept of democracy itself (Folkestyret—the Rule of the People) have been built to reinforce a strong sense of folke, the Danish people.
One result of this emphasis on cohesion is the striking contrast between how Danes view their fellow nationals and how they seem to view the outside world: in 1997, a study of racism in EU countries found Danes to be simultaneously among the most tolerant and also the most racist of any European population. “In the nationalist self-image, tolerance is seen as good,” writes the Danish anthropologist Peter Hervik. “Yet…excessive tolerance is considered naive and counterproductive for sustaining Danish national identity.”
According to Hervik, this paradox helps account for the rise of the Danish People’s Party, or Dansk Folkeparti. Like its far-right counterparts in neighboring countries, the party drew on new anxieties about non-European immigrants and the growing influence of the EU. What made the Danish People’s Party particularly potent, however, was its robust defense of wealth redistribution and advanced welfare benefits for all Danes. “On a traditional left-right scheme they are very difficult to locate,” former prime minister Fogh Rasmussen told me in Copenhagen. “They are tough on crime, tough on immigration, but on welfare policy, they are center left. Sometimes they even try to surpass the Social Democrats.”
Beginning in 2002, the Fogh Rasmussen government passed a sweeping set of reforms to limit the flow of asylum-seekers. Among the most controversial were the so-called twenty-four-year rule, which required foreign-born spouses to be at least twenty-four years old to qualify for Danish citizenship, and a requirement that both spouses combined had spent more years living in Denmark than in any other country. Unprecedented in Europe, the new rules effectively ended immigrant marriages as a quick path to citizenship. At the same time, the government dramatically restricted the criteria under which a foreigner could qualify for refugee status.
To Fogh Rasmussen’s critics, the measures were simply a way to gain the support of the Danish People’s Party for his own political program. This included labor market reforms, such as tying social benefits more closely to active employment, and—most notably—a muscular new foreign policy. Departing from Denmark’s traditional neutrality, the government joined with US troops in military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq; Denmark has since taken part in the interventions in Libya and Syria as well. (In his official state portrait in the parliament, Fogh Rasmussen, who went on to become general secretary of NATO in 2009, is depicted with a Danish military plane swooping over a desolate Afghan landscape in the background.)
Yet the immigration overhaul also had strong foundations in the Liberal Party. In 1997, Bertel Haarder, a veteran Liberal politician and strategist, wrote an influential book called Soft Cynicism, which excoriated the Danish welfare system for creating, through excessive coddling, the very stigmatization of new arrivals to Denmark that it was ostensibly supposed to prevent. Haarder, who went on to become Fogh Rasmussen’s minister of immigration, told me, “The Danes wanted to be soft and nice. And we turned proud immigrants into social welfare addicts. It wasn’t their fault. It was our fault.”
According to Haarder, who has returned to the Danish cabinet as culture minister in the current Liberal government, the refugees who have come to Denmark in recent years overwhelmingly lack the education and training needed to enter the country’s advanced labor market. As Fogh Rasmussen’s immigration minister, he sought to match the restrictions on asylum-seekers with expedited citizenship for qualified foreigners. But he was also known for his criticism of Muslims who wanted to assert their own traditions: “All this talk about equality of cultures and equality of religion is nonsense,” he told a Danish newspaper in 2002. “The Danes have the right to make decisions in Denmark.”
3.
Coming amid the Fogh Rasmussen government’s rightward shift on immigration and its growing involvement in the “war on terror,” the decision by the Danish paperJyllands-Posten in September 2005 to publish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad seemed to bring into the open an irresolvable conflict. In the decade since they appeared, the cartoons have been linked to the torching of Western embassies, an unending series of terrorist attacks and assassination plots across Europe, and a sense, among many European intellectuals, that Western society is being cowed into a “tyranny of silence,” as Flemming Rose, the former culture editor of Jyllands-Postenwho commissioned the cartoons and who now lives under constant police protection, has titled a recent book.1 In his new study of French jihadism, Terreur dans l’hexagone: Genèse du djihad français, Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, suggests that the cartoons inspired an “international Islamic campaign against little Denmark” that became a crucial part of a broader redirection of jihadist ideology toward the West.
And yet little about the original twelve cartoons could have foretold any of this. Traditionally based in Jutland, Jyllands-Posten is a center-right broadsheet that tends to draw readers from outside the capital; it was little known abroad before the cartoons appeared. Following reports that a Danish illustrator had refused to do drawings for a book about Muhammad, Rose invited a group of caricaturists to “draw Muhammad as you see him” to find out whether they were similarly inhibited (most of them weren’t). Some of the resulting drawings made fun of the newspaper itself for pursuing the idea; in the subsequent controversy, outrage was largely directed at just one of the cartoons, which depicted the Prophet wearing a lit bomb as a turban. Even then, the uproar began only months later, after the Danish prime minister refused a request from diplomats of Muslim nations for a meeting about the cartoons. “I thought it was a trap,” Fogh Rasmussen told me. At the same time, several secular Arab regimes, including Mubarak’s Egypt and Assad’s Syria, concluded that encouraging vigorous opposition to the cartoons could shore up their Islamist credentials.
Once angry mass protests had finally been stirred up throughout the Muslim world in late January and early February 2006—including in Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan—the crisis quickly took on a logic that had never existed at the outset: attacks against Western targets led many newspapers in the West to republish the cartoons in solidarity, which in turn provoked more attacks. By the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in early 2015, there was a real question of what Timothy Garton Ash, in these pages, has called “the assassin’s veto,” the fact that some newspapers might self-censor simply to avoid further violence.2 Jyllands-Posten itself, declaring in an editorial in January 2015 that “violence works,” no longer republishes the cartoons.
Lost in the geopolitical fallout, however, was the debate over Danish values that the cartoons provoked in Denmark itself. Under the influence of the nineteenth-century state builder N.F.S. Grundtvig, the founders of modern Denmark embraced free speech as a core value. It was the first country in Europe to legalize pornography in the 1960s, and Danes have long taken a special pleasure in cheerful, in-your-face irreverence. In December Politiken published a cartoon showing the integration minister Inger Støjberg gleefully lighting candles on a Christmas tree that has a dead asylum-seeker as an ornament (see illustration on page 34).
Explaining his own reasons for commissioning the Muhammad cartoons, Flemming Rose has written of the need to assert the all-important right to “sarcasm, mockery, and ridicule” against an encroaching totalitarianism emanating from the Islamic world. He also makes clear that Muslims or any other minority group should be equally free to express their own views in the strongest terms. (Rose told me that he differs strongly with Geert Wilders, the prominent Dutch populist and critic of Islam. “He wants to ban the Koran. I say absolutely you can’t do that.”)
But Rose’s views about speech have been actively contested. Bo Lidegaard, the editor of Politiken, the traditional paper of the Copenhagen establishment, was Fogh Rasmussen’s national security adviser at the time of the cartoons crisis. Politiken, which shares the same owner and inhabits the same high-security building as Jyllands-Posten, has long been critical of the publication of the cartoons by its sister paper, and Lidegaard was blunt. “It was a complete lack of understanding of what a minority religion holds holy,” he told me. “It also seemed to be mobbing a minority, by saying, in their faces, ‘We don’t respect your religion! You may think this is offensive but we don’t think its offensive, so you’re dumb!’”
Lidegaard, who has written several books about Danish history, argues that the cartoons’ defenders misread the free speech tradition. He cites Denmark’s law against “threatening, insulting, or degrading” speech, which was passed by the Danish parliament in 1939, largely to protect the country’s Jewish minority from anti-Semitism. Remarkably, it remained in force—and was even invoked—during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. According to Lidegaard, it is a powerful recognition that upholding equal rights and tolerance for all can sometimes trump the need to protect extreme forms of speech.
Today, however, few Danes seem concerned about offending Muslims. Neils-Erik Hansen, a leading Danish human rights lawyer, told me that the anti–hate speech law has rarely been used in recent years, and that in several cases of hate crimes against Muslim immigrants—a newspaper boy was killed after being called “Paki swine”—the authorities have shown little interest in invoking the statute. During the cartoon affair, Lidegaard himself was part of the foreign policy team that advised Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen not to have talks with Muslim representatives. When I asked him about this, he acknowledged, “The government made some mistakes.”
4.
Last fall I visited Mjølnerparken, an overwhelmingly immigrant “ghetto” in north Copenhagen where Omar el-Hussein, the shooter in last year’s attack against the free speech meeting, had come from. Many of the youth there belong to gangs and have been in and out of prison; the police make frequent raids to search for guns. Upward of half the adults, many of them of Palestinian and Somali origin, are unemployed. Eskild Pedersen, a veteran social worker who almost single-handedly looks after the neighborhood, told me that hardly any ethnic Danes set foot there. This was Denmark at its worst.
And yet there was little about the tidy red-brick housing blocks or the facing playground, apart from a modest amount of graffiti, that suggested dereliction or squalor. Pedersen seems to have the trust of many of his charges. He had just settled a complicated honor dispute between two Somalian families; and as we spoke, a Palestinian girl, not more than six, interrupted to tell him about a domestic violence problem in her household. He has also found part-time jobs for several gang members, and helped one of them return to school; one young man of Palestinian background gave me a tour of the auto body shop he had started in a nearby garage. (When a delegation of Egyptians was recently shown the neighborhood, the visitors asked, “Where is the ghetto?”)
But in Denmark, the police force is regarded as an extension of the social welfare system and Pedersen also makes it clear, to the young men especially, that he works closely with law enforcement. As last year’s shooting reveals, it doesn’t always work. But city officials in Copenhagen and in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, describe some cases in which local authorities, drawing on daily contact with young and often disaffected Muslims, including jihadists returning from Syria, have been able to preempt extremist behavior.
Across Europe in recent weeks, shock over the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees has quickly been overtaken by alarm over the challenge they are now seen as posing to social stability. Several countries that have been welcoming to large numbers of Syrian and other asylum-seekers are confronting growing revolts from the far right—along with anti-refugee violence. In December Die Zeit, the German newsweekly, reported that more than two hundred German refugee shelters have been attacked or firebombed over the past year; in late January, Swedish police intercepted a gang of dozens of masked men who were seeking to attack migrants near Stockholm’s central station. Since the beginning of 2016, two notorious far-right, anti-immigration parties—the Sweden Democrats in Sweden and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands—became more popular than the ruling parties in their respective countries, despite being excluded from government.
Nor is the backlash limited to the right. Since the New Year’s attacks by migrants against women in Cologne, conservative opponents of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy have been joined by feminists and members of the left, who have denounced the “patriarchal” traditions of the “Arab man.” Recent data on the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, who in January were polling at 28 percent of the popular vote, shows that the party’s steady rise during Sweden’s decade of open-asylum policies has closely tracked a parallel decline in support for the center-left Social Democrats, the traditional force in Swedish politics. Confronted with such a populist surge, the Swedish government announced on January 27 that it plans to deport as many as 80,000 asylum-seekers.
As the advanced democracies of Europe reconsider their physical and psychological borders with the Muslim world, the restrictive Danish approach to immigration and the welfare state offers a stark alternative. Brought into the political process far earlier than its counterparts elsewhere, the Danish People’s Party is a good deal more moderate than, say, the National Front in France; but it also has succeeded in shaping, to an extraordinary degree, the Danish immigration debate. In recent weeks, Denmark’s Social Democrats have struggled to define their own immigration policy amid sagging support. When I asked former prime minister Fogh Rasmussen about how the Danish People’s Party differed from the others on asylum-seekers and refugees, he said, “You have differences when it comes to rhetoric, but these are nuances.”
In January, more than 60,000 refugees arrived in Europe, a thirty-five-fold increase from the same month last year; but in Denmark, according to Politiken, the number of asylum-seekers has steadily declined since the start of the year, with only 1,400 seeking to enter the country. In limiting the kind of social turmoil now playing out in Germany, Sweden, and France, the Danes may yet come through the current crisis a more stable, united, and open society than any of their neighbors. But they may also have shown that this openness extends no farther than the Danish frontier.
—February 10, 2016

#danemark #migrations #asile #réfugiés

Live and Work in Denmark with a Danish Green Card
▻http://www.permitsandvisas.com/live-and-work-in-denmark-with-a-danish-green-card

Live and Work in Denmark with a Danish Green Card While exploring professional opportunities it is natural to seek a place that offers high standard of life, great infrastructure and high per capita income. Denmark is undeniably popular for providing these for the skilled immigrants. The policy for Denmark Work Permit/Danish Work Visa has been attracting […]

The Death of the Most Generous Nation on Earth | Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/10/the-death-of-the-most-generous-nation-on-earth-sweden-syria-refugee-e

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Generous Nation on Earth
Little Sweden has taken in far more refugees per capita than any country in Europe. But in doing so, it’s tearing itself apart.

By James Traub
February 10, 2016

The Swedish Migration Agency in Malmo, the southern port city on the border with Denmark, occupies a square brick building at the far edge of town. On the day that I was there, Nov. 19, 2015, hundreds of refugees, who had been bused in from the train station, queued up outside in the chill to be registered, or sat inside waiting to be assigned a place for the night. Two rows of white tents had been set up in the parking lot to house those for whom no other shelter could be found. Hundreds of refugees had been put in hotels a short walk down the highway, and still more in an auditorium near the station.

#suède #Migrations #asiles #réfugiés #crise_politique_européenne

Don’t damn Denmark: the neighbours are even worse when it comes to refugees

According to recent reports, Denmark’s notorious “jewellery bill” – which allows immigration authorities to confiscate valuables from refugees in order to cover the cost of their accommodation – has yet to actually bring in any cash and the exercise is looking more and more like an expensive PR disaster for the Danish government.

▻https://theconversation.com/dont-damn-denmark-the-neighbours-are-even-worse-when-it-comes-to-re
#Danemark #politique_d'asile #politique_migratoire #asile #migrations #réfugiés