Denmark’s Turn to Temporary Protection Has Made It a Pioneer in Restrictive Immigration Policies

A traditionally relatively homogeneous and egalitarian welfare state, Denmark since the turn of the millennium has moved from a liberal approach toward humanitarian protection to a strict policy structure that has put it at the forefront of governments pondering new restrictions. Recent moves such as exploring external asylum procedure arrangements with Rwanda and making the status of all refugees in the country temporary, regardless of their humanitarian protection needs, are signs of how Denmark has become a first mover in the European Union for protection-narrowing policies. During the 2015-16 European migration and refugee crisis, the country also received international attention for policies including confiscating arriving asylum seekers’ valuables.

This development is fairly recent. Denmark was one of the first signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which secured international protection for people facing persecution or fleeing war. In 1983, it ratified the first Aliens Act, which was known for a liberal approach to refugees. Since 1989, Denmark has been part of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) resettlement system, receiving approximately 500 resettled refugees per year except during the 2016-19 period, after which the quota was reduced. However, in the early 2000s and following the 2015-16 crisis, attitudes and policies changed to support a more restrictive system based on the seemingly contradictory policy approaches of integration through self-sufficiency and a focus on returns. Notably, this development has been welcomed across the political spectrum during the past decade, and the center-left’s embrace of restrictions has been identified as crucial to its ability to stay in power even as other countries have seen the right and far right rise over migration issues.

At the same time, the proportion of Danish residents who are immigrants has increased, from 2.6 percent in 1980 to 12.6 percent in 2025. Danish-born children with two immigrant parents represent an additional 3.7 percent of the population, an increase from less than 0.4 percent in 1980.

This country profile reviews historical and contemporary migration trends in Denmark, with a focus on the country’s turn towards making humanitarian protection temporary as well as its potential role as a lodestar for restrictive migration policies across the European Union.

Historical Trends Reflect European Consolidation and Rising Humanitarian Need

During the late 19th century, Denmark received primarily seasonal labor migrants: from Germany and Sweden to carry out the potato harvest, among other things, while workers from rural Poland were recruited into the booming dairy and sugar-beet farming industries. Polish labor migrants arrived in significant numbers to the islands of Lolland and Falster up until World War I, at which point immigration largely flatlined. At the end of World War II, Denmark received several hundred thousand German refugees fleeing the Red Army. The largest refugee camp in Danish history, housing 35,000 Germans, was established in Oksbøl, Jutland. During the Cold War, Denmark received exiles from Hungary in 1956, and a number of political refugees from Chile and Vietnam up through the 1970s. Also in the 1960s and 1970s, guestworker programs brought immigrants primarily from Turkey, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and Morocco, although these initiatives ended in 1973. In the 1980s, wars in the Middle East prompted new humanitarian flight to Denmark from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. And the 1990s saw an influx of refugees from primarily Bosnia, as a result of the Balkan wars.

Denmark’s joining of the European Community (now the European Union) in 1973 and its entering into the Schengen Area in 2001 meant EU citizens have since been able to work, study, and travel freely in Denmark according to the principle of freedom of movement. A similar agreement for nationals of the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) has been in effect since 1952. Following the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements, labor migrants from new Central and Eastern EU Member States started to arrive. In 2024 the two largest groups were Romanian and Polish citizens, who constituted 16 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of all labor migrants from the European Union. After the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Denmark saw a larger mixed flow of asylum seekers and other migrants. The country received approximately 31,000 Syrian refugees in the 2014-16 period. And with the 2015-16 crisis, asylum seekers from countries including Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Somalia also came in search of protection.

In recent years, refugees and their families have comprised the largest share (35 percent as of 2022) of Denmark’s non-EU, non-Nordic immigrant population, greater than those who obtained residence permits for labor and family reunification (24 percent each) and other purposes (these numbers do not include the Danish-born children of immigrants). The Danish government in recent years has recruited labor migrants, especially in the health and elder-care sectors, partly in response to declining birth rates. To aid this effort, in 2022 the government introduced a fast-track procedure for certified companies to perform more flexible international recruitment. Of the nearly 24,600 work permits issued for 2022, approximately 8,000 persons were recruited under the fast-track scheme.

Immigration Today

As of the start of 2025, there were 753,000 immigrants in Denmark and another 224,000 Danish-born children with two immigrant parents, out of a total population of nearly 6 million. The immigrant population underwent a more than fivefold growth since 1985, from 141,000, and a relative growth of 10 percentage points, from comprising about 2.6 percent of the overall Danish population to 12.6 percent. Including Danish-born children of two immigrant parents, 16.3 percent of the country in 2025 had a foreign background, up from 3 percent in 1980. Most people (71 percent in 2024) immigrate to Denmark with the purpose of work or study. This percentage has been relatively stable since 2014, with the notable exceptions of 2015 and 2022, when the numbers of asylum seekers increased significantly due to the Syrian civil war and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, respectively. In 2022, approximately 30,000 Ukrainians received temporary protection under the Special Act on displaced persons from Ukraine. In 2023, Denmark granted residence permits to more than 1,300 refugees, who comprised 1 percent of all immigrants with residence permits in Denmark.

While immigration has increased, the share of Denmark’s population that is immigrant-origin (foreign born or the children of two foreign-born parents) remains much smaller than that of countries such as Sweden, which was 27.5 percent immigrant-origin in 2024.

Individuals from Nordic countries represented the largest foreign-born group in 2025 (205,000; see Figure 3). That year, the next largest group of immigrants and descendants originated from Turkey (7 percent), followed by people from Poland (6 percent), and Ukraine, Romania, and Syria (5 percent each).

Integration Issues and the Turn to Temporary Protection

Despite the fact that Denmark’s population has become more diverse and multi-ethnic, the country has never oriented itself towards developing into a multicultural society, in the political sense of the term. For instance, there have not been major notable efforts to offer programming focused on ethnic minorities to counteract systemic discrimination, nor have there been explicit goals of diversity representation in political life; when they do exist, these kinds of efforts have been at the municipal level, in street-level practices, or by the private sector. Denmark is well known for its tight family reunification rules for refugees, compared to neighboring states which take a more liberal approach. In Denmark, family reunification rules favor high-income and educated immigrants. Among other things, both partners need to be minimum 24 years of age, meet the integration criteria, and be self-supporting; the spouse living in Denmark must also have independent residence and present a financial guarantee of 59,052 Danish kroner (approximately U.S. $8,900). In Sweden, by comparison, the self-supporting requirement does not apply for individuals with a residence permit as a refugee, and family reunification can happen below the age of 21.

Recent Danish governments across the political spectrum have explicitly sought to deter humanitarian and other irregular immigration using flashy policies including the 2016 “jewelry law”—which allows police to confiscate asylum seekers’ cash or valuables with a value above 10,000 Danish kroner (approximately U.S. $1,500) upon arrival, in order to pay for their stay in the country—and placing advertisements in Lebanese newspapers about how rules are tightening.

The range of legislative changes represents a recent novelty. In 2019, 114 restrictions were enacted within the area of integration and immigration policy, in what has been designated “the paradigm shift” (paradigmeskiftet). That year, a temporary subsidiary protection status to the Aliens Act was introduced, meaning all humanitarian residence permits granted since then have been done so with a view to temporary stay, making temporary protection the new norm for all humanitarian immigrants in Denmark—including resettled refugees. This shift places a greater focus on self-sufficiency and refugee repatriation, which also manifested in the 2020 establishment of the Danish Return Agency (Hjemrejsestyrelsen) to facilitate the return of immigrants without legal status. As of December 2022, approximately 550 asylum seekers whose claims had been denied were in the Return Agency’s return planning phase.

Danish authorities have traditionally focused on aiding immigrants’ self-sufficiency through labor market integration, to reduce dependency on welfare benefits. Likewise, repatriation was also part of the temporary residence programs receiving refugees from Bosnia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It is still possible to obtain permanent residence, but only after eight years of residency in Denmark and if refugees fulfill a range of criteria such as passing language tests and providing proof of full-time employment for at minimum 3.5 years during the last four years prior to the application.

However, in sum, the policy shift since 2015 signified a turn away from integration as the predictable path to permanent residence and in the direction of temporary stay even for refugees with recognized protection needs. In practice, however, if an extension for a residence permit has been denied, it is difficult for authorities to repatriate individuals due to the lack of cooperation from countries of origin, such as the former Assad regime in Syria. Therefore, refugees without residence permits who refuse to voluntarily return to their origin are required to stay in departure centers (udrejsecentre) without cash benefits or right to work. It is possible to move freely in and out of the departure centers, however some foreign nationals—for instance, people on tolerated stay or those who have been ordered to leave Denmark by court—have a notification obligation. Researchers have shown these centers are designed to motivate individuals’ voluntary return and it is common for authorities to separate family members at age 18 and above. After the fall of the Assad regime in November 2024, the Danish Refugee Appeals Board put ongoing cases regarding Syrian nationals temporarily on hold.

Migration in the Public Debate

The paradigmeskiftet of 2015-19 consolidated a long tradition of migration being a central focus for Danish policymakers. Notably, support for these restrictions has come across the political spectrum, most prominently during cabinets led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, of the center-left Social Democrats and in power since 2019. Such policies had formerly been objectives of the right-wing Danish People’s Party (DPP), but the Social Democrats have since made them their own. In recent years, scholarly expertise on migration has also been challenged by the growing politicization of the field. For instance, in 2021 a pair of Danish members of Parliament accused migration scholars of being activists promoting “anti-science.”

Among the concerns related to labor migration are issues of “social dumping” involving employers’ circumventing of labor laws and hiring foreign workers at low rates. The Danish labor market is famous for its “flexicurity”—also known as the Danish model—in which a high degree of job mobility combines with a solid unemployment security net. Essentially, the model is centered around negotiations involving trade unions, the main employers’ association, and the government. Rather than having minimum wages enshrined in law, these tripartite negotiations determine the level of salaries and basic working conditions. However, in sectors offering low-skilled work and services such as construction, agriculture, and the service sector, labor migrants are often recruited outside of the trade union negotiations, in a process that seems to violate the collective agreements and lower the general costs of the workforce. Furthermore, some sectors—such as the ever-expanding platform-mediated gig economy—are exempted from the collective agreements. As such, Denmark offers an opportunity for a growing low-skilled workforce that includes many migrants on student visas who seem primarily interested in earning money, rather than studying.

The Role of EU Migration and Asylum Policy

Since 1992, Denmark has had four opt-outs from EU cooperation, declining to join the euro, justice and home affairs, EU citizenship, and defense (which was abolished in 2022). Due to the opt-out from EU cooperation on justice and home affairs, Denmark is not directly obligated by EU migration and asylum policy, except for the Dublin III regulation outlining Member State responsibility for asylum claims and the Eurodac regulation mandating the capture of applicants’ biometric data.

In practice, this means Denmark does not abide by EU laws relating to asylum standards and only participates in supranational legal policy when rules are adopted by the government. As legal observers have pointed out, this is probably why Denmark has been able to navigate outside the bloc’s general asylum legislation and instead turn to temporary protection and revocation policies. Nevertheless, Denmark led 14 other Member States in May 2024 to jointly call for the EU Commission to further outsource migration policy and enact stricter migration control. This call came shortly after completion of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which seeks to more equally share responsibility for border security and speed up asylum processing and returns. Danish and other governments suggested the need for “return hub mechanisms” making it possible for EU authorities to transfer rejected asylum seekers to third countries such as Kosovo. This idea is somewhat along the lines of Denmark’s plans to externalize asylum processing to Rwanda, which as of this writing had resulted in the signing of a memorandum of understanding but no concrete arrangements. More recently, several EU Member States have looked into the possibility of externalizing asylum procedures to third countries, similar to the 2024 agreement between Italy and Albania.

A Regional Influencer

Of the 56 countries in the 2020 Migration Policy Index of integration measures, Denmark had the lowest score for immigrants’ access to family reunion and the fourth lowest (after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan) for access to permanent residence. The increasingly tough policies on integration and immigration have spilled over to neighboring countries including Sweden, which is looking to and finding inspiration in the “Danish model” (notably, in this case the phrase is used not for the famous labor market policy but for the restrictive migration policy). For instance, enforced cooperation and promotion of reintegration and refugees’ repatriation were on the agenda at the latest annual meeting of Nordic migration ministers, in 2024, as was intensified security at EU external borders. In 2024, German leaders made explicit reference to Frederiksen’s Danish government as an inspiration for their Migrationswende (“migration transition”) shift towards more restrictive asylum, border control, and deportations policies, following several Islamist terror attacks.

For now, Denmark is forging a path as a potential leader for more restrictive approaches to humanitarian migration in northern Europe. While other countries including Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Italy have implemented new restrictions as result of the far right’s growing political power, Denmark is an outlier for doing so under a Social Democrat-led government. International observers have sometimes viewed this dynamic as a curiosity, yet Danish officials have said their approach is necessary to protect the welfare system and ensure that benefits are only being offered to residents who fully contribute to tax revenue and other social structures.

For a small, largely homogenous country at Europe’s northern fringe, it will be interesting to follow Denmark’s path as a northern polestar for increasingly more restrictive approaches to migration in the future.

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