Kay Xander Mellish explores how Denmark sorts immigrants into good and bad categories: skilled workers are actively recruited while over 20,000 Syrian refugees face tightened asylum rules. Success is unpredictable. Vietnamese and Chilean refugees from the 1970s thrived, but Somali and Palestinian refugees have unemployment rates above 26 percent.
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Hello and welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kay Xander Mellish. Have you ever seen the movie The Wizard of Oz? It's a classic. When Dorothy arrives in the Land of Oz, the first thing she's asked is, are you a good witch or a bad witch? I was having lunch with a friend this week, and over club sandwiches she said, it's a shame there's only one word for foreigner in Danish, when actually there's 2 types of foreigner here. I got her point, even though I think there's only one word for foreigner in most languages. But what she was really saying is there's no single way in Danish to say, are you a good foreigner or a bad foreigner? If you've been to Danish dinner parties, often later on in the evening when a fair amount of wine has been consumed, you hear a Danish person complaining about foreigners in Denmark. They come here just to take advantage of our system. All they want is free education, free healthcare. welfare payments. They don't contribute to Danish society at all. And then at some point someone will turn to you and say, oh, but we don't mean your kind of foreigner. You know, a good foreigner. The kind who works or studies or is married to a Dane. The kind who's an engineer or a doctor. The kind who opens restaurants with unfamiliar but unchallenging food. Smiling, young, healthy, industrious— good foreigners. Good foreigners are highly sought after at the moment. This week, for example, one of the big business groups said that Denmark should aim for at least 150,000 new immigrants in the next 20 years. The Danish population is aging, so the country needs younger workers to drive Denmark's economy. The business group held a conference on ways to attract them and make them feel welcome. Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt came by to offer more international schools and less red tape. These are things that Denmark can do to attract good foreigners. On the other hand, in just the past couple of months, more than 20,000 Syrian refugees have arrived in Denmark. But no one's too worried about how to attract more refugees or make them feel more welcome. In fact, some Danish political parties are trying to change the asylum conditions and send as many of these people as possible Back home to the battlefield. It reminds me sometimes of an old-fashioned faucet with the hot and cold knobs. Denmark is trying to turn one knob on and the other one off. The funny thing about immigration is that you never know which immigrant is going to be a success in Denmark. Some of those doctors and engineers don't like it here. They don't like the climate. They can't make friends. They can't find the right type of job. So they go home. On the other hand, some refugees end up as great successes. The refugees who came to Scandinavia from Chile in the 1970s have done particularly well. The number one pop star in Denmark right now is Medina, who is a woman of Chilean descent. Vietnamese refugees from the 1970s have also been pretty successful. If you need a tailor in Copenhagen, I can refer you to my excellent Vietnamese-Danish shop owner. But there's no hiding that some refugees have had a really difficult time integrating into Denmark. Somali refugees, for example, started coming to Denmark in the 1990s, so 20 years ago at least. And according to government statistics, only 26% of Somalis of working age have jobs. So more than 70% of working age are on some sort of government support. The Somali crime rate is also very high, with a lot of violence against women. Palestinian refugees, who also came in the 1990s, have also had a really hard time in Denmark. Only 33% of working-age people with Palestinian background have jobs. When Danish people complain about foreigners, this is what they're really complaining about. The social welfare system is set up so that when you're young and you're healthy and you're working, you put in a lot, and then when you are pregnant or old or sick, then the rest of society takes care of you. When people don't put into the pot but only take out, that makes Danish people furious. Some well-meaning people want to paper over these differences between different groups, and they say it's racist to point out that some people are doing better than others. For example, in last week's podcast, I mentioned that some of Denmark's 1960s housing projects had become warehouses for non-Western immigrants, which is the current pretty much inaccurate Danish code word for immigrants without education or jobs. I got an angry comment on howtoliveindenmark.com. Why did I have to say that? Would it have mattered if they were Western immigrants? And the answer is yeah. You will have a hard time getting any Dane to move into an apartment complex where the majority of the residents are Somali or Palestinian. That Dane would have to be pretty damn desperate. But an apartment complex full of French business executives, Australian students, African diplomats, Indian doctors, Thai business owners. That's different. That's kind of chic. Many Danes would feel very open-minded and progressive to be living alongside such a stylish international crowd. But then again, those are the good foreigners. And that's the How to Live in Denmark podcast for this week. I will be taking a couple of weeks off the podcast because I'm working on the Chinese version of my book, How to Live in Denmark. It will have some special Chinese-focused content, but I will post a couple of best-of podcasts to the feed just in case you miss them. I'm also working on a paper version of the How to Live in Denmark book. Lots of people are saying, yeah, it's great with an ebook on Amazon and stuff, we need a piece of paper we can hold in our hand and use for Christmas gifts. So I'm working on that for you guys right now. In the meantime, you can get in touch with us via the How to Live in Denmark Facebook page, at howtoliveindenmark.com, or at @how2liveindk on Twitter. The 2 is a number. See you next time. See you in a couple weeks. Bye.
