The Class and Political Roots of the Refugee Integration Crisis in Scandinavia: Denmark as a Model

Integration as a Shared Responsibility: A Critical Left Reading amid the Rise of the Right-Wing Anti-Immigrant Discourse, the Problematic Understanding of the State, and Certain Erroneous Practices of a Minority of Migrants

The refugee integration crisis in Europe cannot be understood in isolation from the context that produced it. The large waves of refugees did not emerge in a vacuum; they are for the most part a direct consequence of wars and systematic destruction that have ravaged entire societies. This destruction continues today: in Gaza alone, the number of victims of Israeli aggression since October 2023 has exceeded seventy-two thousand Palestinians, the majority of them children and women, while approximately two million people have been displaced. In Sudan, Yemen and Syria, wars continue to produce unceasing waves of displacement. In February 2026, the United States and Israel carried out military strikes against Iran; regardless of the nature of the dictatorial and reactionary Iranian regime, this direct military aggression against a sovereign state consolidates the logic of war and militarism as a substitute for international law, and produces more civilian casualties and displaced persons. These wars and conflicts are ignited or supported, most of the time, by alliances between capital and right-wing forces in the West and their regional allies. It is deeply paradoxical that these same forces that contributed to destroying entire societies are today at the forefront of those who brandish the banner of hostility toward migrants and portray them as a burden rather than as victims of the wars they themselves ignited.
The question of integration has occupied the foreground of the political scene in the Scandinavian countries and in some northern European countries for decades, and its virulence renews itself with each electoral season. Despite the diversity of national contexts, these countries converge in facing similar problems: the rise of the right-wing anti-immigrant discourse, the drift of center-left parties toward more rigid positions on the immigration file, and the absence of a serious structural explanation for the causes of integration failure among a minority of newcomers. Denmark stands out in this context as the most rigid model currently, having adopted in recent years some of the most severe immigration and integration laws in the Western world. This reading takes Denmark as an analytical model, not because it constitutes an exception — for it embodies these contradictions with striking clarity — but also because I reside there and follow its developments closely, which allows me to observe these problems from the inside. The situation is, in its essence, general and applicable to similar contexts in other European countries with advanced welfare systems.


A Note to the Reader: The Danish Party Landscape
The Danish political landscape is divided into two main blocs. The blue right-wing bloc comprises Venstre (the historical liberal party), the Danish People s Party — Dansk Folkeparti (nationalist populist), which has established since the beginning of the millennium an anti-immigration discourse that has become a reference point for political competition in the country and has pushed the entire political landscape to the right on this issue, in addition to Liberal Alliance and the conservatives Det Konservative Folkeparti.
The red left-wing bloc comprises the Social Democratic party — Socialdemokratiet, which represents a glaring example of the left s drift toward the right on the immigration file, having led governments that passed some of the most severe immigration laws in Danish history despite its historical belonging to the social left. The Socialist People s Party — Socialistisk Folkeparti occupies a centrist position.
The Enhedslisten — Red-Green Alliance represents the most explicit left wing at the parliamentary level in its rejection of racism toward migrants and its demand for integration policies based on international human rights conventions. However, this clarity does not conceal fundamental contradictions: its positions on foreign policy and armament have distanced it from the traditional socialist stance opposed to war and militarism; it has supported growing defense spending at the expense of social protection, and has even proposed extending compulsory military service to women rather than demanding its abolition. These developments have led the forces of the radical left to express explicit reservations about considering it a reliable left-wing option, even if it remains, on the file of social rights and integration, the best option the current parliamentary landscape offers.
Outside these parliamentary blocs, radical left parties and organizations are active in Denmark without holding parliamentary representation, but they constitute a living and important part of the left landscape: communist parties in their various orientations, revolutionary socialist organizations, anarchist movements and independent trade unions. These forces, whether acting from inside or outside parliament, constitute the main source of pressure for the preservation of social gains and resistance to the right-wing anti-immigrant discourse.
This partisan distribution is not a mere organizational map; it is the key to understanding the nature of the ongoing debate on immigration and integration in the current electoral campaign preceding the legislative elections scheduled for March 24, 2026. In the midst of this campaign, in a context of intense competition between the two blocs, the question of refugees and integration returns to the forefront of the political debate with notable weight, as if it were presented as one of the fundamental problems threatening the cohesion and future of Danish society.
Most parties, including some center-left parties, tend to explain the success or failure of integration through cultural, religious or ethnic factors. These factors undoubtedly play a role in certain aspects of integration, but their impact remains limited and insufficient to explain the phenomenon in its essence. Instead of treating integration as a complex social and historical process in which structural, psychological and economic factors are intertwined, it is reduced to simplified cultural and religious slogans used to stoke fear and mobilize voters, with the direct negative effects that this entails on the integration process itself.
It is indispensable here to distinguish between two types of "Danish values": the authentic values based on the principles of citizenship, equality and human dignity enshrined in the Constitution and the international human rights conventions, and the "Danish values" promoted by the right under the name of "national identity," based in their essence on intolerance, racism, discrimination and national chauvinism. This discourse leads in practice to treating the inhabitants of the country of immigrant origin — first and second generation born and raised in Denmark — as accused persons required to continuously prove their innocence because of their religious or national affiliation, even though the vast majority of them work, contribute and effectively integrate into Danish society. Some of these discourses go beyond the rights values guaranteed by the Danish Constitution and the international human rights conventions.
However, a deeper question is rarely raised in the public debate — neither by the blue bloc nor by most parties of the red bloc: what does the state mean in the minds of those who have spent a large part of their lives under a state that represses and plunders? And how can this deeply rooted experience influence their relationship with any other state? The matter is not limited to the first generation alone, for this image of the state can be transmitted indirectly to the second generation born in Denmark, through the daily language at home and the way of speaking about institutions, authority and the law. The child who grows up in an environment that looks at the state with suspicion and fear may inherit this outlook before even having his own experience with it, which makes addressing this psychological and historical dimension a necessity that touches generations, not merely individuals.


The State as They Knew It: An Apparatus of Repression, Not an Institution of Service
Many refugees from the Middle East and some regions of Asia and Africa have spent most of their lives under authoritarian and corrupt states. For them, the state was not a public institution serving society and protecting the rights of its members. In their daily experience, it was a repressive power apparatus functioning generally in the interest of a narrow elite at the expense of the broader society, associated with systemic corruption, bribery, security apparatuses dominating public life and a bureaucracy not subject to popular accountability. It was most often an unelected power, or one resorting to fictitious and fraudulent elections that were nothing more than a facade to legitimize an already existing rule, and treating people as submissive subjects rather than citizens endowed with rights.
This deeply rooted experience with rigged elections — or with their total absence — partly explains what the statistics in the Scandinavian democracies reflect: the low voter turnout among Danes of foreign origin compared to native citizens. Participation in elections is not an innate behavior; it is an acquired practice built on a deep confidence that the individual s voice makes a real difference. Those who have known in their lives nothing but ballot boxes that change nothing, or that are used to falsify the will of the people, need time and a concrete experience to become convinced that things are different here.
More importantly, these states, in many cases, did not emerge in a vacuum. They formed and consolidated power through a close alliance between political leaders and local and global capitalist elites who benefit from them. They are states that have often received political, military and financial support from Western powers — including Denmark — under the pretext of regional stability and combating extremism, while crushing civil society and preventing any form of independent democratic or union organization. This international context is an integral part of understanding the crisis: the Western societies that today question the causes of integration difficulties bear at the same time a great historical responsibility for the economic inequalities and the maintenance of the regimes that engendered these refugees and created in them this deep relationship of mistrust and fear toward the state.
In such repressive and corrupt regimes, it becomes entirely natural for people to try to circumvent the state rather than cooperate with it. They avoid official procedures, evade laws and tax payments, seek informal ways to complete their transactions, and rely on networks of personal, family and regional relationships rather than public institutions in which no one has confidence. This is not a hereditary cultural specificity in the simple essentialist sense. It is, for the most part, the logical consequence of a long and inherited historical experience with a state that systematically repressed and plundered society rather than serving it.
This complexity is enriched by another dimension that public debate often overlooks: many refugees carry not only a political experience with the authoritarian state, but also traumas of war, displacement and persecution that cast a deep shadow over their capacity to trust any institution regardless of its nature. This psychological dimension cannot be treated by institutional explanation alone; it requires specialized support that should be an integral part of any serious integration policy.


The Welfare State: A Model Born of Class Struggle
When these refugees arrive in Denmark, they find themselves facing a model radically different from everything they have known. Although the modern state remains in the end part of a class social structure within the capitalist system, it rests in Denmark and in the Scandinavian countries in general on democratic institutions, free and independent elections, relatively high institutional transparency and legal rules applied in a largely equal manner to all, regardless of their affiliation or wealth — a model that is in no way comparable to what they experienced in their countries of origin.
However, acknowledging these achievements does not mean overlooking the class character of the Danish state. For it is ultimately a capitalist state operating within an economic system that concentrates wealth and reproduces social inequalities. Free public education, universal healthcare, the social security system and workers protection laws were not born with the Danish state; they were wrested through long decades of social and organizational struggle between workers and capital, and were never a voluntary concession from the ruling class. It should be noted that this Scandinavian model — the welfare state — has experienced a notable decline since the 1990s, when social democratic parties began drifting toward the liberal center, progressively abandoning the priorities that had forged this model in favor of managing capitalism rather than challenging it.
These achievements are not protected forever. They are always exposed to erosion whenever the left and trade union movement weakens and its presence in the public space recedes. The history of capitalism proves that capital does not voluntarily relinquish what has been wrested from it, and that every decline in the strength of collective organization opens a window for reducing these rights again under renewed pretexts. Thus, the preservation and development of these achievements are, in every generation, conditioned by the vigilance of left and progressive movements, the continuity of their organization and their active political participation.
This historical truth is the fundamental key to understanding the nature of the Danish state. When a migrant or refugee is told that the state here is "different," this statement remains abstract unless paired with the historical context that produced this difference: organized labor movements, strikes and protests, collective bargaining, and a political struggle that extended over generations before leading to this level of social rights.
This state also rests on a legal system grounded in the principles of human rights, including legal equality between women and men, the separation of religion from the state, the protection of children s rights, and the right of all citizens and residents to education, healthcare and human dignity regardless of their social or economic status. For many refugees coming from societies where these rights do not enjoy adequate legal protection, assimilating these rules and understanding their logic is not merely a cultural adaptation, but an essential part of understanding the very nature of the secular democratic state and its mode of functioning.
One of the most notable results of this system is that the migrant woman coming from environments where women suffer from legal discrimination and strict social constraints finds herself facing a rights system that guarantees her broader protection in the areas of work, education, divorce, child custody and freedom of movement. She often discovers for the first time legal rights of which she had been deprived.
The vast majority of refugees gradually adapt to this model and interact with it in a positive and effective manner. They learn to trust public institutions, enter the labor market, pay taxes, participate in community life and raise their children within this system. Many of them have become active participants in all aspects of Danish society, including vital economic sectors such as healthcare, services, transport, construction and food industries — sectors that now depend substantially on this workforce, without which essential services benefiting the whole of society would grind to a halt.
In certain sectors, the workforce of foreign origin now represents the overwhelming majority of the labor force, since these sectors require a willingness to work in arduous conditions and extended hours. This genuine economic contribution rarely finds its way into the public political debate, which is obsessed with the negatives; it is a contribution that deserves recognition and appreciation, not neglect.
It must also be noted that integration into the labor market does not run up only against obstacles on the part of the migrants themselves. Research proves the existence of genuine structural discrimination: applicants with foreign names are rejected at higher rates than their counterparts with Danish names regardless of their qualifications. This discrimination is not an individual problem but a structural bias within the capitalist labor market, and remedying it requires strict legislation and organized trade union pressure.
There is, however, a small minority that remains for longer captive to the old experience with the state and the authoritarian patriarchal legacy, treating the Danish system with the logic of what it was accustomed to in its former country: recourse to informal work, attempts to circumvent the laws, reliance on informal networks rather than public institutions, or attempts to impose restrictions on women in the family and in the raising of children that contradict the rights system that Danish law guarantees to all. In some cases, the matter is not only about the relationship with the state, but about the pressure of the community, sect and religion, which forms a parallel power competing with that of public institutions and imposing on individuals — especially women and children — conformity with norms that contradict the Danish rights system. This parallel communal power requires independent treatment for which institutional explanation alone does not suffice.


Integration Policies and the Problematic of Understanding the State
The integration failure of this minority is generally explained in the prevailing political debate as a fundamental cultural or religious problem justifying more restrictions, more tests and more conditions. The more nuanced and realistic explanation is that the issue is, in many cases, a painful transition from a deeply rooted conception of the state as an apparatus of repression and corruption to a radically different conception that sees in it an institution of social solidarity deserving trust and participation. Those coming from authoritarian experiences need time and real investment to understand that the relationship between society and the state in Denmark rests on rules completely different from what they experienced.
Current Danish integration policies do not address this fundamental dimension sufficiently. Instead of focusing on explaining the nature of state institutions, their mechanisms of operation and the history of struggle that produced them, there has accumulated in recent years, under growing pressure from the right and the far right, an integration policy oriented toward tightening laws, broadening values tests and imposing increasing restrictions on residency and certain social rights. Policies that proceed from the prior assumption that the refugee in general is a problem to be contained and controlled, rather than a human being carrying a complex historical experience that needs to be understood and dealt with seriously.
This approach does not merely fail to achieve integration. It may reinforce in some refugees the old image of the state as a hostile entity lying in wait for them — which is precisely the opposite of what declared integration policies seek to accomplish.
By contrast, genuine integration requires a clear explanation of how citizenship-based state institutions operate, the organic relationship between taxes and public services, and the role of trade unions and labor laws in protecting workers. Learning the language is undoubtedly necessary, but it alone is insufficient to understand society. Understanding the state and its institutions, and understanding the relationship between social rights and shared obligations, is no less important than the ability to speak Danish.


Participation in Social Solidarity
Among the concepts that need to be reformulated in the context of integration is the concept of informal work, known in Denmark as "black work." In some countries, working without registration or tax payment is considered something natural and necessary for survival, and is sometimes viewed as a form of resistance against a corrupt state that does not deserve to be funded. This logic is historically understandable in the context of authoritarian regimes that appropriate taxes for the benefit of rulers rather than in service of society.
However, a major paradox cannot be ignored: Danish capital owners themselves resort to tax evasion and informal work through far more sophisticated methods and on an incomparably larger scale, via tax havens, shell companies and legal loopholes crafted to serve them. Concentrating public and political criticism on the practices of a minority of migrants while turning a blind eye to the tax evasion of the capitalist class is neither a neutral nor a principled position — it is an obvious political deployment to divert attention from the structural contradictions of the system and place on the weakest link the responsibility for crises it did not create.
Nevertheless, in a country like Denmark that depends on a collective progressive tax system — wrested through struggle and protected through organization — to finance public services, informal work means not merely a legal infraction, but the weakening of a system of social solidarity built over generations. Every tax paid here goes to schools, hospitals, infrastructure and the social security system from which everyone benefits, including the refugees themselves.
When a person understands this organic connection between what they pay and what society receives, paying taxes becomes an entirely different act. It is no longer submission to an external authority; it becomes voluntary participation in a system of social solidarity from which everyone benefits.
The same applies to attempts to circumvent the laws. In authoritarian regimes, people may view resistance to the state as a form of self-defense, and even as legitimate opposition to a corrupt regime. In a society based on shared public institutions, these practices weaken the mutual trust between society and the state and reduce the resources on which schools, hospitals and public services — from which everyone benefits — depend.
The same logic applies to the phenomenon of absenteeism from work and false declarations of illness to obtain social benefits to which one is not entitled. In countries where the state plundered its citizens, appropriating the advantages of the social system may be perceived as a way of reclaiming one s rights or taking revenge on an unjust power. But this logic is completely inverted in a society based on social solidarity despite its class character: these benefits do not come from the treasury of a despot; they are funded by the taxes of manual and intellectual workers who built this system over decades of collective struggle. Circumventing them does not harm the state as an abstract institution; it harms the social solidarity from which everyone benefits, including the refugees themselves.
More seriously still, these erroneous practices — even though they emanate from a small minority — provide the right and the far right with a golden pretext to reinforce their racist discourse and portray all migrants as a burden on society. This is a discourse they ultimately deploy to justify the reduction of social achievements that affect everyone — native inhabitants and migrants alike. It is therefore in the interest of the refugees themselves, before any other consideration, to be the most vigilant in preserving these achievements and in providing no pretext to those who seek to dismantle them.
Genuine Integration: A Social Experience and a Shared Responsibility
For all these reasons combined, integration policies can include practical and concrete examples that bring these concepts closer to everyday reality: how schools and hospitals are funded by taxes, how a worker obtains his or her rights through formal employment contracts and trade unions, how laws protect workers when employment is formally registered. This understanding can be reinforced by encouraging the participation of refugees in political, civic and trade union life, and in local associations and community activities.
When people see how democratic institutions function in daily life, and how left-wing organizations, labor, trade union and social movements have managed to wrest broad social rights through collective organization, integration becomes a genuine social process rather than a mere administrative commitment or a values examination imposed by the state from the outside.
Integration is a shared responsibility — that is beyond doubt — but the distribution of this responsibility cannot be equal. The state with its institutions and the media bear the largest share of this responsibility, because they possess the tools, resources and authority necessary to shape policies and form public consciousness.
The state must invest in explaining the nature of its institutions and their history of struggle rather than confining itself to imposing values tests and tightening laws. The media bear a particular responsibility: they have the duty to focus on the many positive aspects of the integration journey and to bring them to light, rather than amplifying certain erroneous practices that remain the exception rather than the rule and that deepen social division.
For their part, the small number of refugees who continue to view the state through the prism of their past experiences need a genuine reconsideration of that image. The state in Denmark, despite its shortcomings and class contradictions that cannot be denied, is not an apparatus of daily corruption and repression as many knew in their former countries. It is, to a large extent, a public institution that guarantees fundamental rights, provides broad social services and upholds the law before everyone equally.
This fundamental difference is precisely what that minority needs to assimilate. Respecting the laws, registering employment, paying taxes and interacting with public institutions transparently are not mere legal obligations imposed by an external authority, but constitute a form of effective participation in a system of social solidarity that has formed over long decades of struggle by manual and intellectual workers, left-wing, trade union and social movements.


Political Participation
It is precisely from this starting point that participation in elections becomes a necessary duty today. The electoral vote is a tool of real influence over decisions that affect the lives of everyone daily — from health and educational services to labor laws and housing policies. Danes of foreign origin who abstain from voting leave the field open to voices that shape policies at their expense and feed the racist discourse that portrays them as a burden rather than partners.
In the elections of March 24, 2026, no independent radical left option appeared on the ballot, which places the left-wing voter before an unavoidable tactical choice: voting for the parliamentary left forces most defensive of the rights of manual and intellectual workers and most opposed to the racist discourse, while maintaining continuous accountability for their contradictions — especially their support for growing defense spending that drains the resources of schools, hospitals and the social welfare system. It is a tactical wager, not unconditional endorsement.
Yet parliament is only one of the important arenas of struggle. Trade union organization, community work and popular pressure from outside parliament are what historically created social achievements and what protects them today. Those who have long lived under a state that stole their votes and crushed their organization now have a double opportunity: to cast their ballot in the ballot box, and to engage in collective trade union and community organization — for radical change has never come from ballot boxes alone, despite their importance.
In conclusion, there is a question that cannot be evaded: how do we call upon the migrant to integrate into a society that we simultaneously describe as a capitalist class society? The answer is that this society, despite its class character, is not a monolithic and homogeneous entity. It is a field of struggle within which manual and intellectual workers and the left have, over generations, wrested genuine social rights. The integration intended here is not a capitulation to the existing system nor an acceptance of its conditions as they are. It is active engagement in this very struggle. The migrant who pays taxes, joins a trade union and participates in political life acquires the tools of socialist struggle and becomes a partner in the process of transforming this society — not merely a beneficiary of its achievements. Integration and socialist struggle are two faces of the same coin in the experience of all those who have fought for a more just society throughout history.

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