If the welfare state can survive Nazis, it can survive migrants
A new law disposessing migrants was passed via scare tactics
By Asher Kohn
Denmark is considered a wonderful country to live in, but it’s a hell of a place to enter. The nation’s parliament has enacted a law declaring that refugees will be forced to surrender any cash or items with a value over 10,000 kroner ($1,450). Bank balances and items of sentimental value are exempt, but proponents justify the seizures as a way for the welfare state to pay for refugees’ support.
Migration is a tremendous strain on the “Nordic Model” of national welfare, and Denmark’s politicians have said that asset seizure is a way for new Danes to contribute their share to the pot. The country has expected its citizens to buy in — at a steep price — for more than a century. So why should aspiring Danes be treated any differently?
Because times have changed, and how. The Danish welfare state has its origins in 1908 as a unique way to finance Denmark’s defense. Peter Munch, a politician from the island of Lageland, saw no way for his homeland to defend itself from the German Empire with guns alone. He recommended the development of “a Danish culture as far removed from the militaristic culture of the conquering state as possible.” The government created a national health system, cheap education, and price controls at his suggestion. The idea was to construct a sort of Danishness that could survive a German invasion.
Denmark remained neutral in World War I. Munch was foreign minister by 1940, when his belief in culture as defense was put to the test. Under Nazi occupation, the Danes were allowed to manage their own affairs. This let Denmark save its Jews. Only 500 of Denmark’s 8,000-strong Jewish community were sent to concentration camps, the rest were evacuated to Sweden on the boats of individual Danish fishermen. Just 50 Jewish Danes were killed in the Holocaust. The community was saved by a Danish society who saw them “as friends, neighbors, not as Jews.”
This spirit of unity blossomed into a welfare state in the 1950s, governed by the Social Democratic slogan: “Do your duty, claim your rights.” All major political decisions agreed upon since World War II — to join NATO, to resist using the Euro, to permit an autonomous commune in the capital — were made to keep the welfare state intact. Pride in the welfare state is the cornerstone of Danish exceptionalism.
But with regards to migrants, as Norwegian sociologist Grete Brochmann writes, “welfare states do not have time to let history do the job” of integration. Danish culture managed to survive the Nazi threat. It might not survive this wave of migration.
Migrants are perceived as an even greater menace because they want to become Danes. Immigrant communities run the risk of destabilizing the welfare state from within by living in what Brochmann calls a “subsidized isolation.”
Until today, Denmark has dealt with migration by offering a broad menu of legal identities for migrants. It didn’t matter where they were from — Eritrea, Chile, or Syria — but that they were a labor migrant, an asylum seeker or a war refugee. More than 400,000 migrants — nearly 8% of the population — are sorted by what they can offer the Danish state and what the state is willing to offer in return.
Viewed this way, the new seizure law is about building trust, not raising money. Revenues will likely be tiny: A similar law in Switzerland raised only 210,000 Swiss francs in 2015, a year when 50 million francs were earmarked for migrant aid. The Danish law may be seen as purely symbolic, a way to force migrants to embrace the state or leave it entirely.
John F. Kennedy once famously begged his fellow Americans to ask not what their country can do for them, but what they their country. Migrants flee to Denmark today because they have a fairly good understanding of what that country can do for them. So Denmark’s elected officials are asking what migrants are willing to endure to get into the country.
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