Denmark: Welfare Cost of 'Non-Westerners' up £200 Million. Benefits for Natives Down

by Oliver Lane 

Danish current-affairs magazine MandagMorgen has published a report on welfare and benefits which reveals that while the cost of supporting immigrants and their descendents has exploded, the cost of keeping native Danes is falling.

The magazine, which is a publication of one of Scandinavia's leading think-tanks differentiates between “immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries” and ethnic Danes in its report. The revelation that the cost of welfare for the immigrants has increased by two billion kronor (over £200 million) since 2010 has prompted a bout of soul-searching amongst the leaders of Denmark’s Social Liberal pro-immigration party, who are presently part of the ruling coalition.
Denmark has experienced a sudden rush of immigration from these non-Western groups in past decades, and over one-in-ten Danes is now an immigrant or the descendant of one. Two thirds of immigrants, some 400,000, are non-Western, with Somalis, Turks, and Iraqis forming large, visible groups.



The arrival of large groups of immigrants from cultures unlike Denmark has caused friction within the country. An opposition politician was reported saying in July: “It is primarily Muslim immigrants who do not value democracy and freedom. In certain environments, they directly oppose it. Too many non-Western immigrants with Muslim backgrounds do not want our freedom-orientated society model.
“There is a danger that the cohesion of our society can be threatened in the future if we do not dare put right and reasonable requirements for those coming to Denmark”. This report will confirm these concerns that immigrants aren’t pulling their weight in Danish society.
Director of Danish think-tank the Rockwool foundation Torben Tranæs said: “The significant improvements in integration we saw from the late 1990s through the 2000s, has at best stopped. The difference between Danish and non-Western immigrant employment levels has stalled at a high level… It is alarming and calls for new long-lasting action”.
The problem has become so pronounced the Danes have even coined their own compound word to describe the situation; ‘forsørgelsesgab’, which means the ‘dependency gap’ between immigrant and native communities.
The pro-immigrant Social Liberal party’s leader said of the report:“We need to admit that there are too many immigrants in the unemployment statistics and outside of the job market. There are too few in education and too many in the crime statistics”.
The party’s ‘naturalisation’ spokeswoman Marlene Borst Hansen agreed: “We can see that there is a solid difference in how well different immigrants take care of themselves and how much they contribute to society. I don’t think that is due to resistance, but maybe we haven’t been clear enough about our demands and our expectations over the past few years”.
Since 2008, the number of non-westerners in Denmark receiving “full time” benefits has increased by 35% to 100,000, a heavy burden in the small Scandinavian country with a population of only five and a half million. In the period since 2010, native Danes have exhibited an opposite trend, reducing their own welfare bill by eight million Kronor.