ABSTRACT
Denmark has transformed from having one of the world’s most liberal immigration laws and most humanitarian asylum policies in the 1980s, to being strongly unwelcoming to non-Western immigrants and asylum-seekers, especially after the legislative ‘paradigm shift’, that was persistently pushed through by Danish People party (DP) in recent decades. The change came about due to some fundamental cultural, economic and political circumstances, among which the following should be highlighted: the crisis of the universality of the universal welfare state, the EU enlargement, which provided Denmark with workers culturally similar to locals and the results of integration policies, or more importantly, the dominant subjective interpretation of them in recent decades. We argue that these factors, among many others, have influenced Denmark’s priorities with regard to who, among future migrants, will be welcome to reside in the country. The formerly so-called ‘extreme right discourse’ is now institutionalised and is here to stay.
