BONUS: Older Foreigners in Denmark
Nonagenarians and Centenarians, oh my
I usually write about international children in Denmark since I have spent the greatest chunk of my professional life as a teacher in Danish international schools. I fell across something interesting so I want to take you on a little detour into the fascinating world of the internationals who are over 90 living in Denmark.
First things first. As of the first January 20251 , there are 2008 people with foreign citizenship over the age of 90 living in Denmark and 46 of them are over 100 years old.
They come from all over the world (but mostly Germany)
Here are the just over 100s:
My first hypothesis was that international family members living in Denmark were bringing their older parents or grandparents to live with them so I drilled into the data.
Looking at immigration stats from the last 5 years, only 64 foreigners over the age of 90 moved to Denmark from abroad and in the last 10 years, 895 foreigners over the age of 80 moved to Denmark from abroad. There are significant numbers of internationals over 90 who have been here for decades.
This led me on to my next hypothesis: that maybe they are not immigrants in the traditional sense of the word: someone who moves from one country to another. Indeed the history of the Danish-speaking minority of northern Germany could mean that many of these internationals are basically Danes who happen to hold German passports. That is hard to figure out from the statistics available.
One thing that jumped out at me, from the stats I do have though, was that 98 of the over 90s right now are "descendants"2, as in they were born here but their parents were foreign.
The top 5 nationalities of descendants over 90 are:- Sweden, Germany, Poland, USA, Norway.
Of the four “descendants” over the age of 100 in Denmark right now, three had British parents and one had Vietnamese.
I find that an interesting quirk of the stats that you can be older than (and lived in Denmark for longer), than the politicians who get to decide who is really Danish or not, and still not be considered properly Danish because your folks were from Malmö or Newcastle or whatever.
Sometimes when I get annoyed that I am still unemployed3, I think about starting my own business. One of my ideas is an English-speaking retirement community. This is also because I think it would be nice for myself when I reach retirement age, and so someone needs to set it up so it is ready for me when I get there. (Dementia runs in my family, so as much as I would be fine Danish language-wise right now, all bets are off when I get over 80.)
If anyone is inspired to do it before me, feel free! Most of the international over 90s are clustered in the Capital Region but there are quite a few in North and Central Jutland, too. There is definitely a group waiting to be catered for out there.
From the FOLK2 dataset on statbank.dk
“Efterkommere: En person, der er født i Danmark, og hvor ingen af forældrene er både danske statsborgere og født i Danmark. Hvis der ikke findes oplysninger om nogen af forældrene, og personen er udenlandsk statsborger, opfattes personen også som efterkommer. Hvis blot én af forældrene er født i Danmark og opnår dansk statsborgerskab, vil personen fremadrettet blive registreret som værende af dansk oprindelse.”
12 months and counting now.