The story of Akdogan’s own family, and how the broader society referred to them, is revealing. It is the story of how people went from being perceived as strangers to being regarded as a threat.
“In 1973, when my mother came to Denmark, she was a guest worker,” the MP explains. The term recognized that she was actively participating in the society. Then in the 1980s, she became a foreign worker. “She had become a foreigner but she still was a worker” who was seen as contributing. Then, in the 1990s, she recalls, “there were these words like ‘Paki’, ‘Turkish’, or ‘black’ … it was their national identity that was at the front.” And finally, after 9/11, she became a Muslim. Age, gender, ethnicity, language, nothing else mattered. She was, Akdogan says, “reduced to one thing, and that was her religion.”41
The fear of Islam that has gripped Denmark has also reshaped its political debate. During the 2015 election campaign, the so-called foreigner question took up over 40 percent of newspaper articles and television coverage and set off a culture war over Danish identity that lasted long after the election. The shift in tone has had an impact. The Conservative Party’s leader declared in the last campaign, “A Muslim culture from the Middle Ages will never become as valued here as the Danish culture that has grown from this old piece of earth,” sounding more like a DPP candidate.42 Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister, once told a newspaper that it was the kulturkamp, not economic policy, that would be the determining factor in Danish politics of the future. He was right.
The dominant strain of politics these days emphasizes Danish culture and rejects anything foreign, especially if it’s Islamic. It has even affected politicians who present themselves as libertarians. The widespread feeling is that Islam is “something that needs to be criticized, that needs to be seen as a threat,” says Rasmus Brygger, who is twenty-seven and was until recently the youth leader of the Liberal Alliance, Denmark’s most staunchly economically conservative party, before he had a falling out with the party over the immigration issue.
Brygger doesn’t believe this new political climate is primarily the Danish People’s Party’s work, as others argue. “It’s because of how the other parties reacted to the DPP,” he insists. It is more a question of rhetoric than policies. “You see a lot of things being said, especially on social media but also by politicians today that you would never have seen just five years ago and that would not even have been accepted if it came from the DPP,” Brygger explains.
Despite his free-market libertarianism, Brygger is now seen as a leftist in the Danish media because of his views on immigration. This is a clear sign of how dramatically the political battle lines have shifted. Left and right used to be defined by economics in Denmark; now those boundaries are defined by immigration policy.
With the old predictable cleavages over welfare and taxes moving to the back burner, it is one’s position on refugees and integration that now provides one’s political identity. Politicians used to have real ideological positions, whether conservative or socialist, giving voters something to cling to when populist winds blew. But that era is over. It’s dangerous, says Brygger, “because if you don’t have an ideology and you don’t have some kind of core principles, you can just go anywhere you’d like.”43
The sudden obsession with Danish culture and identity is largely a reaction to the more visible presence of immigrants, many of whom are religious. In parts of rural Denmark, voters see it as a threat if they can’t sell pork or publicly celebrate Christmas, says Brygger. “They see their culture under fire. So to them it’s not a matter of economics.”
But it’s not necessarily those living side by side with new immigrants who are voting for the DPP. Brygger believes “if you have grown up with Mohammed as your neighbour, then you wouldn’t have that kind of view.” The kind of people who vote DPP, he says, tend to live in areas with very few Muslims. The electoral map confirms that the party has strong support in many lily-white parts of the country.
But as in Holland, there is a powerful clash between what has become a staunchly secular society and a newly arrived population that is pious and practising. “We are one of the most atheist countries in the world,” says Brygger. It’s rare to see Christians wearing crosses, so head scarves came as a shock.44
This is particular to countries like Denmark, Holland, and France, which pride themselves on a secular identity. Praying five times a day or eating halal meat is considered a sign of extremism by Danes who love their bacon and generally only go to church for weddings and funerals, if at all. As Brygger argues, no American Christian who prays regularly would ever be singled out in public debate as an extremist. In many parts of the United States, that is considered normal.
Arne Hardis, the conservative Danish journalist, believes that the extremely blunt public debate is a virtue. Talking about serving pork in public schools may make Americans laugh, he admits, “but it’s about who should be tolerant of whom. There has to be an open discussion because it’s an ideological fight,” he insists.45 But there is a difference between standing up for freedom of the press against Muslim imams making violent threats and needlessly provoking and marginalizing minority groups.
The problem is that what strikes Danes as a necessary frank discussion often sounds different to immigrants and their children. There are aspects of Danish culture that predate the arrival of nonwhite people and smack of a certain naivety and cluelessness about living in a diverse society. When I lived in Denmark as a teenager in the 1990s, it was normal to see chocolate-covered marshmallow desserts marketed as Negerboller (Negro Balls), and a popular video game at the time, “The Mujaffa Game,” featured a dark-skinned protagonist going through Copenhagen’s streets stealing cars. What appears to some as fun and games is not always perceived the same way by those being mocked.
Media coverage of the immigration issue, like those antiquated traditions, reinforces the sense of nonwhite Danes as foreigners rather than fellow citizens. A study showed less than one percent of sources on Danish television were of minority background. When they do pop up on television, it’s rarely to talk about taxes and health care.46 They tend to appear only when the topic is integration or crime. Unlike in Britain, where BBC News is full of black and brown faces, that level of televised diversity seems nearly impossible in Denmark.
While Brygger agrees with conservatives about many of the problems surrounding immigration and integration, he sees a dangerous trend that many European intellectuals twice his age have failed to grasp: when a small Muslim minority is guilty of violence, which it is, “that can also legitimize solutions to that problem, which can hit all Muslims,” he warns. In Denmark, the result has been that “we in our minds combine Muslims with radical Islam and terrorism, we combine immigrants with crime and rape,” Brygger argues. “So you have this idea of a collective Muslim, and that’s a very dangerous thing.”47
5
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
EUROPE’S FANTASY OF OFFSHORING
The DPP has little to say when it comes to integrating the Danish-born children of immigrants and those who have lived in the country for many years. “They have no answer. They will say they have to act like a Dane, they have to be Christian, they have to go to church, they have to eat pork,” says Thomas Gyldal Petersen, the mayor of Herlev, outside Copenhagen. As for those arriving now, he adds, “They have no answer, other than keep them out.”1
Not talking about integration allows far-right politicians to sidestep serious social policy dilemmas. They want a simple and clear message, which essentially amounts to: refugees should just be sent home.
The DPP’s deputy leader, Espersen, doesn’t deny the charge that his party is trying to make Denmark look unappealing. He has no qualms about sending a message that the party is not interested in integrating further new arrivals, as many of the DPP’s detractors charge. “Instead of what we’ve done in the past, automatically preparing themselves for staying, we should prepare them for going home,” he
insists. Espersen told me in April 2016 that the war in Syria would soon be over. “No war lasts forever, and of course there will be a time and then they must go back,” he said. “The Palestinians, if they get their state, they must go back, too.”
He makes an exception only for those who are settled and have permanent residence and citizenship, and he is very pleased about the negative adverts that Denmark published in Middle Eastern newspapers.2 They helped, says Espersen. People understood that “the streets are not paved with gold here, and it’s not paradise.”
He believes two years of provisional asylum would be fair. “Tell them from the beginning and let them know this is what it is. You have no future in Denmark.” One of the party’s key policy proposals is to offer asylum only on a temporary basis: “Take refugees, give them asylum but under the conditions that they go.” It must be clear that “we don’t want to integrate them. We give them asylum, we help them and everything, but the idea is that they should go back home; and maybe the education for the children here should be more English than Danish so that they can also use that when they get home.”3
Those who do get sent home do not always get a chance to use their English skills.
For some asylum-seekers, even if they are successfully integrated into Danish society, their place in it is not secure. Indeed, Denmark’s get-tough policy has been deadly for some who lived in the country for years. Two Afghan brothers, Vahid and Abolfazl Vaziri, came to Denmark after fleeing Afghanistan with their family in 2006 when they were fourteen and seven. As members of the Shiite Hazara minority, they faced persecution in their home province. First, the brothers went to Iran, where their father disappeared; they eventually made their way to Europe and applied for asylum upon reaching Denmark. They were never approved. In June 2015, Danish police barged into their asylum centre, forced them to pack, and took them to the airport. After several failed appeals, the brothers were cleared for deportation on the grounds that Afghanistan was now “safe” and that Vahid, then twenty-three, could serve as a guardian for Abolfazl, who was then sixteen. They were given approximately $3,500 in cash by Danish authorities and deported to Kabul.4
Andreas Kamm, the head of the Danish Refugee Council—an organization devoted to helping refugees—is confident that Denmark’s asylum appeals process is generally fair and reliable. “If you have a procedure, then you have to send the rejected people back,” otherwise the system loses all credibility and effectiveness. Sixty percent of rejected asylum-seekers do not go back—they stay illegally, he adds. But sometimes the system fails.5
In the case of the Vaziri brothers, they were robbed soon after arriving, and Abolfazl disappeared almost immediately after they returned to their home province of Wardak. Vahid searched for him in vain and eventually returned to Kabul to seek information from the authorities. Penniless, he slept under a bridge with heroin addicts. Two months later, Vahid contacted his Danish lawyer to tell her that a group of Pashtuns had shown him his brother’s body. He fled once again, following the same path he had as a child, heading for Europe through Iran.6
The case has been an embarrassment to Danish officials, but there has been no formal official apology nor any effort to locate Vahid and bring him back to safety in Denmark. Rather than make the country safer, this is just the sort of case that fuels a narrative of victimization among young Danish Muslims and recently arrived refugees.7
Khaterah Parwani, who came to Denmark as an Afghan refugee herself in the 1980s, knows this better than most. As a teenager, she was drawn to radical Islamist groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir and was only pulled back by her parents. She now runs an organization seeking to deradicalize young Danish Muslims; it began with young women but quickly came to encompass young men who had joined radical groups and wanted a way out. She started working on hate crimes against young Muslims in 2013 after the founder of the DPP proclaimed that women choosing to wear a head scarf should take it off if they wanted to avoid becoming victims of street violence.8 Parwani believes stories like that of the Afghan brothers will make the situation much worse. “Young Afghans used to blame the Taliban,” she says. “Now they are blaming the West.”9
The DPP’s focus on toughness doesn’t necessarily extend to sharing the burden with neighbours. When thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants crossed through Denmark en route to Sweden in September 2015, Espersen was quite pleased that they moved on. “They didn’t want to stay here.… They wanted to go to Sweden because they get 300 kroner more a month than we could provide,” he argues, accusing them of welfare tourism. “We don’t stop people that want to leave our country; we’re not the DDR,” he added, referring to the old East Germany. He believes that Eastern European countries are following a similar model—let people come because they’re going to move on anyway. Poland is hostile to refugees, but it also knows that many will leave for Germany within a few weeks. But Espersen has bigger plans. He understands asylum-seekers’ desire to seek a better life but is adamant that Europe bears no responsibility for providing it.
The most elaborate of the DPP’s policy proposals is to mimic Australia, with its offshore detention centres on remote islands like Nauru, an independent nation of ten thousand people that is one-third the size of Manhattan and located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Espersen and his colleagues propose funding and staffing “Danish-driven refugee camps where they will be provided for, but the idea is that they should return.”10 And if they end up on Nauru or in Denmark’s equivalent of it, even better. Then there is no question of integration at all. “We’ve actually called for an Australian model in Denmark,” Espersen’s baby-faced colleague Kenneth Kristensen Berth told me. “We would like to send people to other countries than Denmark to have their asylum complaint assessed.” The goal is to outsource any processing of asylum complaints to other nations so there’s no chance of refugees ever ending up in Denmark.
When I raise the issue of cost and the astronomical expenditures the Australian government has incurred by refusing to admit any asylum-seekers, he seems unfazed. It would be cheap, he insists, “in comparison to what it’d have cost us to have all of those people come.” Moreover, he argues, “you have to remember that this is also a deterrent,” using the Australian government’s favorite label. “Because if people know … we’ll cross the Danish-German border, then we go from getting asylum in Germany to getting our case assessed in Tanzania, I wonder how many people would cross.”11
Although it rarely makes the news, Australia’s immigration policy has become a beacon for Europe’s new right. From France to Denmark, politicians point to the Australian model as the solution for Europe’s refugee crisis, and they are not talking about the points system that Australia uses to determine the educational and skill levels of potential immigrants. The real attraction, especially since the massive refugee influx of 2015, is offshoring.
Spending taxpayer money to ensure that refugees never reach Australian shores has become a specialty in Canberra. Between 2013 and 2016, the government has spent approximately 9.6 billion Australian dollars (approximately £5.8 billion) to turn back boats, transport asylum-seekers, and pay foreign governments and private security companies to detain them in foreign states, thus absolving themselves of legal and sovereign responsibility for the living conditions of the detainees and any obligation to grant them refugee status in Australia if their asylum claim is found to be genuine. The total cost is approximately 400,000 Australian dollars (£244,000) per detained asylum-seeker.12
Rather than rescue people at sea, the Australian navy put intercepted asylum-seekers into small orange lifeboat pods, sealed vessels that were then sent off to sea in the direction of Indonesia.13 For those not turned back, the Pacific backwaters of Nauru and Manus Island were the only options, and the miserable conditions of confinement there were part and parcel of the deterrence policy.
For European politicians seeking to stop the flow of migrants and prevent their populations from even encountering suff
ering refugees fleeing Syria, lest they become sympathetic and welcoming, the Australian model of putting them out of sight and out of mind has undeniable appeal. It is a form of moral and judicial outsourcing.
In September 2015, after the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on Turkish shores, Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, announced that “if the European Union had the right policy, people would know they would not be accepted by coming across the water, just as the Australians dealt with this problem, and that would stop the drownings from happening.”14 Douglas Carswell, UKIP’s only MP at the time, argued, “There are lessons to learn from Australia. It’s come up with something that works.”15
In October 2015, six weeks after being deposed as Australia’s prime minister in a fit of intraparty backstabbing, Tony Abbott arrived in London to give the Thatcher Memorial Address at Guildhall. He praised the Iron Lady’s resolve in the Falklands and offered paeans to Tory greatness before launching into a more self-referential discussion of Australia’s immigration policy and how his government singlehandedly put an end to the arrival of boat people.
He lectured the assembled Tories about the perils of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, calling it a “wholesome instinct” that is “leading much of Europe into catastrophic error.” Due to “misguided altruism,” Europe was weakening itself, argued Abbott, and the only way to reverse the tide, he insisted, was studying and emulating Australia’s policy. By Abbott’s dubious account, no illegal arrivals had reached Australia in over a year and “the immigration detention centres have-all-but-closed; budget costs peaking at $4 billion a year have ended; and—best of all—there are no more deaths at sea.” This, he claimed, was a truly compassionate policy.
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