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[Antiochus]

The national Foreign Policy magazine, which is funded by the U.S. State Dept, comes up with a contrarian defense of Denmark's much criticized policies to the mass Middle Eastern migration to Europe

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/20/in-defense-of-denmark-immigration-europe-refugee-crisis/

Like much of the discourse surrounding the more than 1 million migrants who have washed upon Europe’s shores over the past year, these reductio ad Hiterlum arguments are facile, deployed in the service of a political agenda. Since the crisis catapulted to worldwide attention last fall, many media commentators have adopted a narrative placing Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel, on a pedestal of selfless humanitarianism while relegating other European countries to the ranks of compassionless brutes. While some national governments (like Hungary’s and Poland’s) have indeed responded to the problem in unproductive and even inhumane ways, Denmark’s is hardly one of them. On the contrary, its position on the migration crisis, once derided as a reverberation of the Third Reich, is now looking like the better part of wisdom.

To characterize Denmark’s law, and others like it, as “targeting” migrants is misleading. Rather, with these laws, countries simply ask the same thing of newcomers as they do their native-born citizens. Danes are rightly proud of their social welfare system, one of the most generous in the world. “The welfare state is part of our DNA,” Lars Gert Lose, Denmark’s ambassador to the United States, told me in a recent interview. Danes, he said, “love paying their taxes.” But they don’t take kindly to those who abuse the jealously guarded welfare state, which provides free health care, education, and job training to everyone, as well as accommodation and direct cash handouts to those who cannot make it on their own. Three years ago, long before a deluge of migrants making their way into Europe was considered a possibility, the New York Times published an article about how Denmark was reconsidering its social benefits system, with many Danes suspecting it had become “too rich, undermining the country’s work ethic.” An extreme example lay in the story of “lazy Robert,” an infamous, able-bodied welfare cheat who has conspicuously lived on the dole for more than a decade, and whose story had become a source of both bemusement and national shame. “In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it,” Karen Haekkerup, then-minister of social affairs and integration, told the New York Times in 2013. “My grandmother was offered a pension, and she was offended. She did not need it.”

To most Danes, then, the asset seizure law is not an act of hostility toward migrants, but rather an extension of the Scandinavian principle of social egalitarianism — albeit, also an effort to send a message. (Despite many press reports that the measure is the sole doing of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party, which supports a minority government led by the center-right Venstre, the law is overwhelmingly popular with the Danish public, judging by the parliamentary vote in its favor.) “A fundamental principle in the Danish welfare system is, if you have the means to take care of yourself, you take care of yourself,” Lose told me. “If you don’t have the means, the state will take care of everything from housing to education. This principle applies to Danish citizens as well.”

Regardless of the motivation behind it, the law will apply to very few refugees, the vast majority of whom are arriving without any valuable assets. What seems to most anger critics is that — like the much-derided ad in the Lebanese newspaper — the measure is intended to issue a controversial signal, the necessity of which even Merkel has belatedly realized: Europe cannot simply let the entire world move in. This was a principle that Merkel herself explicated last summer before deciding to undertake her act of humanitarian unilateralism and open Europe’s gates to any Syrian able to make the journey. “Politics is sometimes hard,” she said when a weeping Palestinian girl, whose family risked deportation from Germany, confronted her on live national television. “You’re a very nice person, but you know that there are thousands and thousands of people in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and if we say, ‘You can all come,’ and, ‘You can all come from Africa,’ and, ‘You can all come,’ we just can’t manage that.”

The Swedish political and media establishment’s longtime uniformity on immigration — brooking no dissent from an open-borders policy and labeling any criticism of it as morally beyond the pale — allowed for the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a once-marginal, far-right party that is now the third largest in the country. Even further to the right of the Sweden Democrats are paramilitary groups that have taken to harassing and beating migrants. In Denmark, by contrast, where immigration skeptics were never written out of the political conversation, alternative views have always been part of the political system. Though the Danish People’s Party is often mischaracterized as “far right,” it is not nearly as extreme as the Sweden Democrats. Anti-migration sentiments are thus channeled in a healthy way — the parliamentary process — and not onto the streets.

Attacking Denmark for being stingy and uniquely nationalistic in its approach to the migrant crisis is also unfair in light of its massive development aid budget and commitment to internationalism. Denmark is one of only five countries in the world contributing more than the U.N.-recommended 0.7 percent of its gross national income to development aid, which funds the sorts of programs that address migration at its source: poverty and conflict in the underdeveloped world. It has also sustained the highest number of casualties per capita of any NATO member in the military alliance’s mission in Afghanistan, is a generous contributor to the military campaign against the Islamic State, and is an active participant in the diplomatic process seeking an end to the Syrian war, the main driver of the current refugee crisis.

Meanwhile, to characterize Denmark as not having carried its share of the burden in Europe’s refugee crisis is distorting facts. Writing in Foreign Policy, James Traub called Denmark’s refugee policy “abhorrent” and, specifically, worse than France. Yet, in 2015, Denmark received far more asylum-seekers per capita (21,000 out of a total population of 5.6 million people) than France has pledged to take in over the course of the next two years (30,000 out of a total population of 66 million). To put things in perspective, in per capita terms, 21,000 refugees entering Denmark, a country about the size of Maryland, would be the equivalent of more than 1 million coming into the United States.

More important than any numerical figures related to per capita refugee intake or social welfare spending, however, is the Danes’ cold-eyed understanding of the challenge this crisis poses to Europe’s values and internal political stability. In an essay for the New York Review of Books titled “Liberal, Harsh Denmark,” Hugh Eakin singled out the country for its refugee policy. Visiting last August, right before the migrant wave grew into a tsunami, he chastised the country’s media for writing of an “invasion” from the Middle East “though the influx at the time was occurring in the Greek islands, more than one thousand miles away.” Considering how that “influx,” initially limited to the Mediterranean, soon evolved into a deluge that eventually reached all the way north to Scandinavia, what might have initially seemed to be hyperbolic warnings from the Danish media ought now be considered prescient.

Danes are also the last people who should be lectured to about the sanctity of “European values.” Unlike most of Europe, Denmark has reason to be unambiguously proud of its wartime history, having saved nearly every single one of its Jews during the Holocaust, making latter-day comparisons to the Nazis not only wildly inappropriate but also utterly misplaced. Danes are also strong defenders of freedom of speech, having rallied in defense of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that originally published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005. When former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen became NATO’s secretary-general in 2009, he pointedly refused to apologize to fellow member state Turkey, which had protested his appointment as a grievous insult to Muslims. Contrast that adherence to principle with Merkel’s pathetic groveling before the Turks over a German comedian who “insulted” authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and was recently banned from repeating an offensive poem by a German court.

I believe this is probably the only article from a major American media organization so far that has actually came to defend Denmark's current stance on migrants

 

[Miles Quaritch]

Doesn't pull any punches. The part about Merkel grovelling...goodness.

Although I don't disagree. It has been rather unsightly.

 

[Perfect Blue]

The national Foreign Policy magazine, which is funded by the U.S. State Dept

What?

 

[Guevara]

As time goes by, Denmark looks smarter and smarter.

Their predictions were right, and they handled this well right from the beginning.

 

[Dennis]

Merkel’s pathetic groveling before the Turks over a German comedian who “insulted” authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

This is how the world sees Merkel now.

 

[G.ZZZ]

One thing that many people miss, is that a lot of this immigrant crysis management is purely political. A country taking in a million immigrant, but going on in aggressive foreign wars and meddling with foreign states, as well as doing little in terms of reconstruction and development aid, is not a charity state, it's an hypocrite one that just want cheap manpower for its industries and would destabilize other countries in order to get immigration waves moving.
On the other hand, a country with more restrictive immigration policies, that however engage itself in developement aid of other nations and don't engage in aggressive foreign wars for the interest of their military complex, is not a compassionless monster country.

Of course, none of the two above are actual real countries, those are extremes made just for a point. But again, there's a lot of politicality behind those europeans moves sadly, and what should have been done before (developmental aid, debt cancellation, and stopping foreign intervention left and right), hasn't been done, and now a lot of countries are left having to deal with consequences of actions they never partook in, and sometimes mobilized against. I'm witnessing first hand how this whole migrant crysis is being utilized by politicians to call the welfare system is unsustainable and dismantle it more and more, and removing worker's rights on top of it. All of this campaigning on the back of destroyed human lifes. Absolutely disgusting.