Danes Cast Cold Eye on Immigrants

When she arrived from Ghana 18 years ago, trained caterer Anna Saakwa was swiftly granted a license in her field. She found work cooking for an old folks’ home and learned fluent Danish thanks to the patient tutelage of co-workers and the retirees she was hired to serve.

Such was the pleasant experience for most refugees in Denmark until a few years ago, when opponents of immigration gained the upper hand. By blaming the small foreign community for what few economic ills exist in this prosperous Nordic country, they were able to seal Denmark’s doors against most new arrivals.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘racist,’ because if you use this word with people you want to negotiate with, you block your own path,” says Saakwa, now a leader of the foreign community. “But they are prejudiced. They assume anyone of a different faith or color is a threat.”

Some Danes disturbed by the anti-immigrant atmosphere warn that it not only tarnishes Denmark’s image as a tolerant society but threatens the very prosperity that opponents of immigration claim to be protecting.

Immigration has become one of the most volatile issues confronting the major European Union economies as falling birthrates foreshadow huge labor shortfalls over the next few decades. A United Nations report last month warned EU countries that they face a choice between importing large numbers of foreign laborers and raising retirement age to 72 or older to keep enough people working to support the swelling ranks of pensioners.

Germany and Italy face the biggest challenges in maintaining their populations and their economic power, says the report from the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Spain and Britain also risk serious shrinkage without large-scale immigration.

Throughout the 15-nation EU, 1.7 million more skilled professionals will be needed during the next three years to prevent the region from losing as much as $375 billion in commerce, London-based research firm Datamonitor concluded in a study for Microsoft.

But with the rise of the far right in Austria behind the xenophobic rabble-rousing of Joerg Haider and the soaring ratings of Denmark’s populist Danish People’s Party, European nations have been reacting to such forecasts with anguish and resistance.

Germany’s chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, caused an uproar in the EU’s most populous country with his recent announcement that work visas would be issued to 10,000 foreign specialists in each of the next few years to attract the information technology workers needed for that nation’s economy. Industry analysts estimate that at least 75,000 positions in German technology firms are vacant, with the deficit expected to grow.

Schroeder’s proposal found favor among industrial leaders but precipitated a vitriolic exchange with conservatives who point to Germany’s nearly 11% unemployment rate as a reason to throw up fences to outside labor. A regional leader of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, Juergen Ruettgers, demanded “Kinder statt Inder”--children instead of Indians--an appeal for training young Germans rather than letting in the subcontinental computer specialists lining up for visas.

Even though Denmark’s population is among the 10 richest in the world, according to most lists measuring per capita gross domestic product, the nation will have to import skilled labor from impoverished but computer-savvy countries such as India and Russia or watch Internet-driven commerce go elsewhere. Nowhere else in Europe has the anti-immigration rhetoric ascended to such heights.

A small organization preaching multicultural tolerance mocked Danes’ prejudices this year by erecting billboards that showed a black youth saying, “When I become white, I’ll be a schoolteacher.” Activists in the Danish People’s Party responded with a parody showing a homeless white man saying, “When I become a Muslim, I’ll have a house,” echoing the party’s refrain that immigrants are edging out Danes for housing and social services.

Minorities Make Up 2% of the Population

In what Danish Industrial Council Chairman Hans Skov Christensen denounces as “feeding the inner pig-dog of discrimination,” some Danes of late have been demonizing the mere 2% of the population represented by racial and religious minorities. What was once considered ethnic slander now often passes unnoticed in polite conversation.

Steen Karlsen, international general secretary for the 350,000-member Union of Commercial and Clerical Employees, fears economic setbacks are ahead unless Danes get over their propensity for discrimination.

“The language some people use today is very nasty,” says Karlsen. “It’s really something from the bottom, and it makes me both angry and afraid.”

The union has undertaken measures to fight work force discrimination, which is blamed by all but the most strident nationalists for the high rate of unemployment among qualified immigrants--more than 60% among first-generation arrivals--in a country with only a 4% jobless rate, the lowest in the EU.

But appeals for a loosening of the immigration restraints have only intensified the public outcry in long-homogenous Denmark, which has maintained a ban on immigration since 1973. Only a few hundred people seeking political asylum, such as Saakwa, are accepted here each year, plus a few thousand others who are sponsored by resident refugees through provisions for family reunification.

Amid the highly politicized immigration debate, the Danish People’s Party, led by Pia Kjaersgaard, has been drawing as much as 20% support in polls. The minority coalition headed by Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, meanwhile, has dropped to 22% in surveys from the 38% support it won at the polls two years ago.

“The government is not ready to discuss this, as the immigration debate in Denmark is very strong,” says Kim Lunding, deputy director of the Danish Immigration Service, intimating that any easing of the ban would be political suicide. “The government’s position is that we have to take better care of the foreign population already here before we open up.”

Most important for integrating foreigners already in the country is securing jobs for them, Lunding says. But he concedes that employers routinely discriminate against applicants who have obviously foreign names and faces.

“We have to be aware of the fact that [Austria’s] Haider is emboldening anti-immigrant forces all over Europe,” Lunding says.

Mark Bang Kjeldgaard, an official with the Interior Ministry’s immigration department, blames the Danish media for the growing intolerance, noting that news stories often portray asylum-seekers as welfare cheats.

Earlier this year, the Danish government adopted additional immigration restrictions, including a ban on sponsoring elderly relatives beyond their working years and a change in the minimum age from 18 to 25 for foreign partners applying to marry refugees or asylum-seekers already in the country. The latter was invoked to deter arranged marriages, a practice--reportedly prevalent among Muslim immigrants--that most Danes consider a violation of their own sense of human rights and family values.

Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen laments the success in February of Haider and the far-right Freedom Party in gaining a foothold in the Austrian government but doubts Denmark will follow the same path. “Inevitably, there will be a need for us to become a more open society toward the outside world,” Petersen says.

However, Kjaersgaard’s right-wing party insists that will never happen.

“We don’t believe in Denmark turning into a multiethnic society,” says party spokesman Soeren Espersen. “We have never been an immigrant country, and we will never be one.”

He takes heart from Danes’ reaction to EU sanctions against Austria for allowing Haider’s populists into the government. A poll by the Copenhagen daily Berlingske Tidende found only 30% of Danes support the EU sanctions.

Espersen contends that the “clumsy” moves to punish anti-foreigner sentiments angered Danes, who are already skeptical about EU membership and the bloc’s power to bully little countries about their right to decide issues such as immigration.

Some of Europe’s bigger states take a more sober view of the necessity to diversify in the age of an increasingly globalized economy. France, for instance, confers citizenship on about 100,000 foreigners a year, a far larger share than most other EU countries, despite nationalist appeals by the far right led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Paris used the occasion of the national soccer team’s victory in the 1998 World Cup to celebrate the virtues of a multihued state. France’s 3-0 triumph over Brazil was achieved by players whose origins are in North and sub-Saharan Africa, Polynesia and the West Indies, as well as by native Gauls.

In Italy, the government has been apprised of the need to allow in 240,000 immigrants annually just to reach the official goal of maintaining the nation’s 57 million population in the face of one of the lowest birthrates in Europe. But an influx of illegal refugees, primarily from the Balkans, has coincided with disturbing rises in violent and organized crime, confronting Rome with a delicate balancing act between a threatened labor shortage and public perceptions that security is being sacrificed.

Spain Reconsiders Plan to Ease Shortage

Spain, which has the continent’s lowest birthrate, at just over one child per adult female, has witnessed a wave of anti-foreigner sentiments in reaction to a few highly publicized killings attributed to North African immigrants. When a Moroccan man was arrested for the robbery and killing of a Spanish woman in February, residents of the Almeria region went on a three-day rampage of beatings and burnings that left more than 80 immigrants wounded. The violence has prompted the government to reconsider plans to allow another 70,000 immigrants and their families into the country to ease an agricultural labor shortage.

Britain has increasingly become a popular destination for asylum-seekers, with the number of applicants up more than 50% last year over 1998. But the February hijacking of an Afghani jetliner and the government’s decision to return most of those on board to Afghanistan has sent a message that British tolerance and generosity have reached their limits. London tabloids also have spotlighted a few instances of violence blamed on asylum-seekers, including the gang rape of a 20-year-old woman in Sussex last month that threatened to trigger a national backlash against refugees.

With similar immigration problems and nearly identical public resistance to the obvious solutions, the EU countries are pushing at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels for harmony among their policies on migration to better distribute the burdens--and benefits--of integrating hundreds of thousands of newcomers each year.

But if wealthy and stable Denmark is any yardstick, the prospects for industry gaining the high ground in its arguments for more immigration appear as bleak as the northern horizon in the depths of the Nordic winter.

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Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris, along with Janet Stobart in London and Maria De Cristofaro in Rome, contributed to this report.