On September 11, Denmark’s neighbors crossed the Øresund to the polls. A right-wing bloc has now emerged with a majority in the Swedish parliament, depriving Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and her Social Democrats of their position at the head of the government.
However, it was the days and weeks before the election that revealed the full extent of Sweden’s shift to the right. During this time, Andersson and her party proved more willing than ever to adopt the type of anti-immigration measures that have made their opponents popular, including a distinctly Danish policy that has earned Denmark the ire of activists, NGOs and the UN: the ghetto plan.
The year-old ghetto plan, which in 2021 was renamed Denmark’s “parallel society” policy, imposes special housing, education and police measures in residential areas designated by the state based not only on their socio-economic status, but also on the basis of their race. and ethnic composition.
“Holes have been made in the Danish map,” states the government’s ‘A Denmark without a Parallel Society’ report. “Here, too large a proportion of the citizens do not take sufficient responsibility. They do not actively participate in the Danish language, society and labor market. We have a group of citizens who do not embrace Danish norms and values.”
According to the plan, the irresponsible, devalued group of citizens is Denmark’s immigrant population – especially those of “non-Western origin”. Largely because of this distinction, Denmark’s ghetto plan has been the subject of widespread international condemnation, with critics calling it racist and discriminatory. Even so, Mette Frederiksen and her Social Democratic Party have continued to support the policy, which was first implemented and then revised under former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s former leader of the Liberal Party’s disjointed election period.
The Social Democrats’ Swedish colleagues then duly followed suit with their pre-election campaign, which contained linguistic and political proposals that are eerily reminiscent of Danish politics. The party’s election manifesto, for example, outlined policies to prevent new arrivals from settling in areas where large concentrations of non-Swedish ethnicities already reside.
And in early August, the Swedish Prime Minister announced new penalties for gang-related offences, including longer prison terms, explicitly linking the problems with immigration. “Too much migration and too little integration has led to parallel societies where criminal gangs could take root and grow,” the Swedish prime minister explained about the new penalties.
Finally, the Swedish Minister of Integration and Migration, Anders Ygeman, proposed a limit of 50 percent for concentrations of people of “non-Nordic” background in “troubled areas”.
Tough on immigration
It’s a tired tale. With an election approaching, politicians are rushing to win voters over to their side. It is inevitably another draw from the well that never seems to run dry: the threat of the other. Whether based on some political calculation or deep-seated values, they are banking on voters who believe that immigrants and outsiders are to blame for their country’s ills.
In France’s last election, right-wing Marine Le Pen predictably drew deeply from that well, making immigration a central element of her campaign. Despite gaining ground in her third attempt at the presidency, it failed to give her victory over incumbent Emmanuel Macron – the candidate for the long-mythologized political center whose campaign promises also included a tougher stance on immigration.
In the time since the last US election, Republicans have consistently highlighted the border crisis as evidence of President Joe Biden’s lack of leadership, hoping such sentiments will keep the political pendulum swinging in states like Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. when the Oval Office is up for grabs again in 2024.
The underlying fear that critics say is being exploited by hard-line immigration politicians — and what makes it such a potent political talking point — is exemplified at least in part by such baseless notions as the ‘great replacement’ that, under the guise of a academic theory has become a buzzword in both France and the United States.
However, it is Denmark – the progressive beacon that American leftists recognize as proving that socialism is not a bad word, and French expats move to for a better work-life balance – that has most explicitly put forward a policy that aims to prevent the outcome predicted by conspiracy theories. such as the great replacement: the emergence of a majority-minority state and the subsequent collapse of national values. According to a government statement from 2021, the express goal of the parallel society policy is to ensure that residents with a non-Western background make up a maximum of 30 percent in all residential areas in Denmark in 2030.
Denmark’s ghettos
The ‘Ghettolist’, the government-curated list of Danish ‘ghettos’, has been published every year since 2010. In 2018, when the concept of parallel society replaced the ghetto as the official term for these areas, a majority of non-Western populations became the only mandatory criterion for inclusion on the list, along with meeting at least two of four thresholds in the categories of low income, high crime, high unemployment and low education. From 2021, in addition to parallel communities, there are three categories of residential areas: ‘prevention areas’, ‘vulnerable residential areas’ and ‘transformation areas’.
Statistics Denmark, an agency under the Ministry of the Economy and the Interior, defines non-Western as any country outside the EU, with the exception of Andorra, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vatican City.
According to critics, the effect is that non-Western disproportionately means non-white. And because the non-Western definition includes both recent immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants, even a person born in Denmark and raised who speaks Danish will be considered non-Western if they have more recent ancestry in a country that does not is recorded at Statistics Denmark. list.
Garbi Schmidt, migration researcher at Roskilde University, says that the notion of the ghetto has always been tied to race, at least conceptually. In Danish politics, however, Schmidt says that until recently the word has had more to do with socio-economic factors.
“If you look through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and a good part of the ’90s, when there is discussion about the ghettos, it relates to the issue of social class,” Schmidt argued.
Since the early 2000s, when Denmark first unveiled its national strategy against ghettoisation, this has changed. In its 2004 action plan, for example, the government specified goals such as achieving a more balanced composition of residents and reducing the concentration of ethnic minorities as well as immigrants and their descendants in “ghetto areas”.
Today, Schmidt went on to say, “It’s quite obvious that what the plan sees as the problem is immigration and integration.”
Myth or reality?
In contrast to Schmidt, Davide Secchi’s research at the University of Southern Denmark does not typically focus on topics such as immigration and race, but rather on organizational behavior and decision-making. Secchi deals with numbers, computational models and, above all, evidence. However, after reading about Denmark’s parallel society in politics in 2018, he couldn’t help but investigate.
“I was shocked by the allegations that were made, mostly without a shred of evidence,” Secchi said. “There is no such thing as a parallel society in the academic world. There is no literature on it.”
Secchi simply asked a question about the parallel societies the government told him existed in Denmark. Using an approach known as agent-based modeling, an advanced computational method for simulating actions and interactions between autonomous agents in complex systems, he tried to assess the truth of the theory of parallel societies. Was it likely, or even possible, for such a social structure to emerge?
“The answer was no,” Secchi said. “You can’t. It’s highly unlikely that a large number of people with a similar set of non-Western values would basically congregate in a specific area of a city.”
“There is not a one-to-one form of correspondence, that if you have a low income and if you are an immigrant, you also have values that are not compatible with Denmark. It won’t last.”
Secchi planned to continue his research into the matter, but after having two proposals rejected by the Danish Research Council, he lacked the funding and let the matter rest.
“I hope that at some point it will be discussed again by politicians with a greater orientation towards scientific evidence or scientific method,” Secchi said. “I’m not saying they should use agent-based modeling, but it certainly deserves more serious interest.”
Speaking of the current policy, he concluded: “It’s not based on evidence, and that’s the most dangerous part.”
Being ‘Non-Western’
Amandeep Midha has lived in Denmark for almost a decade. He is, by the government’s definition, non-Western. As an accomplished engineer and industry standout, being ‘non-Western’ has largely shaped his experience in the country.
Last year, Midha scrapped plans to move from Copenhagen to Gladsaxe due to concerns that his future neighborhood would end up on the government’s ghetto list. According to the most recently published list, no local communities in that municipality have met the criteria, but two have met the requirements to be considered prevention areas – where immigrants and descendants of non-Western origin exceed 30 percent of the local population.
Prevention areas came about as a result of 2021 legislation passed by a broad majority in Parliament. To prevent prevention areas from becoming parallel communities, the legislation imposed special tenancy rules on the areas and opened the door to “strategic demolition”.
By moving to one of these prevention areas, Midha would have brought the percentage of non-Western residents a bit closer to 50. And since the percentage already exceeded 30 – the maximum allowed by the 2030 target – he doubted that he would be able to stay long.
So Midha moved to nearby Rødovre – a neighborhood that was not on any of the government’s lists. Here, being ‘non-Western’ has still brought its own challenges. He recalls a party held at his home in Rødovre shortly after moving in, when a Danish friend of a friend confronted him with a seemingly innocent question: “How do you live here? Are you Danish?”
For Midha, the question underpinned the kind of sentiment that in some ways explains the existence of the parallel society policy.
“You’re not white enough to come and blend in and live in this neighborhood, and you don’t dare go to another brown neighborhood because you’re going to be here to destroy our community,” he said.
“The whole understanding of the immigrant is based on a stereotype of a Middle Eastern patriarchal, brutal, semi-terrorist Arab.”
Midha, grateful for the opportunities he has found in Denmark, was born in India, not the Middle East. Yet, even though he cannot escape the stigma and stereotype of being non-Western in Denmark, he has expressed even greater hope for those who have been more directly affected by the parallel society policy.
It may be those who have lived in one of Denmark’s longest standing ghettos, Mjølnerparken. The notorious residential area in Copenhagen, of which around 80 percent of residents are classified as non-Western, has been subject to some of the government’s most aggressive efforts to eradicate so-called parallel communities from the country. Proposed measures have included the relocation of entire blocks of flats and the conversion of former public housing into private and cooperative housing.
“Imagine the plight of those people,” Midha said. “The next generation will grow up thinking they were kicked out of a neighborhood because of the color of their skin.”
Source: The Nordic Page