Immigration: Frederiksen’s Way

Denmark’s prime minister since 2019, Mette Frederiksen, has been the leader of the country’s Social Democrats since 2015, and before too long, presided over their switch to a far tougher line on immigration. That switch goes a long way to explain why she became prime minister and why, in the 2022 election, the Social Democrats secured their highest share of the vote (27.5 percent — Denmark’s politics are highly fragmented) for two decades. Adopting that tough line was smart politics, but it was, as Frederiksen has explained, entirely consistent with the Social Democrats’ position as the party of the left that it most certainly is. Indeed, not only was it consistent with that position, but it also flowed naturally from it.

In February, Frederiksen explained her thinking to the New York Times’ David Leonhardt:

There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society…Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.

Indeed.

Between 1960 and 2015, the share of the Danish population that was foreign-born rose from to 2 percent to roughly 9 percent.

Leonhardt still believes that “those richer countries, where birthrates have plummeted, will need to admit immigrants to keep their economies functioning smoothly.” They don’t, unless mass automation is a myth, but, no matter, his treatment of the Social Democrats’ trajectory is fair, including his explanation that, on this issue, they are returning to the point where they were half a century (or more) ago, a story told by Mattias Tesfaye, who is now Denmark’s education minister and is of Danish and Ethiopian descent, and whose book on immigration played a key part in changing the party’s attitude. A central theme of that book, writes Leonhardt, is

that the Danish political establishment spent decades refusing to listen to its own voters. By the early 1980s, the unpopularity of rapidly rising immigration was evident to the politicians who were willing to see it. These politicians tended to be the Social Democratic mayors of the working-class suburbs where many immigrants were settling because housing was more affordable than in central Copenhagen.

They were ignored for decades.

Not only did that lead to the rise of a party of the populist right that won over plenty of formerly Social Democratic voters, but it also shook the sense of social cohesion needed to underpin a welfare state as generous as Denmark’s.

Leonhardt:

Academic research has documented that societies with more immigration tend to have lower levels of social trust and less generous government benefits. Many social scientists believe this relationship is one reason that the United States, which accepted large numbers of immigrants long before Europe did, has a weaker safety net. A 2006 headline in the British publication The Economist tartly summarized the conclusion from this research as, “Diversity or the welfare state: Choose one.”

There are all sorts of reasons why a country should not want to see the development of “parallel societies” within its borders, but, for the Social Democrats, preserving support for the welfare state ranked very highly. That meant a focus on assimilation, and assimilation is almost impossible when large-scale immigration continues. And so the Social Democrats have not reversed the hard line on new migrants taken by their immediate right-of-center predecessors but built on it. The increase in the foreign-born share of the population is still rising (it now stands at 12.6 percent), but that’s far lower than neighboring Germany and Sweden, where that figure is 20 percent.

Sweden’s Social Democrats (currently in opposition) have been moving in the same direction as their Danish counterparts, and its center-right government has hardened immigration restrictions considerably.

Whether that will do the trick has yet to be seen.