Discouraging Internationals
One country at a time
The Danish government have announced that they want to limit immigration because of the large increase of Nepal (and Bangladesh) student immigration. They have the idea that Nepalese students are coming here on study permits for fake courses, with the secret plan of taking a shitty jobs for no money. They worry that they work too cheaply and so depress wages for everyone.
They want to remove work permits for international students attending courses that haven't been government approved and they want to stop issuing work permits to the spouses of international students.
Phew. There is a lot to unpack there.
It is time for A Data in Denmark Deep Dive!
What resident permits do Nepalese immigrants have?
I have been staring at this dataset1 for a while now trying to figure out the best colour scheme so I feel like I am old friends with it. For all you people just getting acquainted, let me bring your attention to something. Yes, there is an astonishing growth of Study (Education) and Study (Other reasons)2 but look at the amber line (Work) for a second. A steady increase, a significant increase and then a drop. Did something make it harder to get work permits after 2022 or did they realise that Study permits were easier in 2022?
I do not have the answer to that one.
How does the Nepalese population of Denmark break down?
The lion’s share are young, university age people3 right now.
You will understand why I only want to look at immigrants in their 20s and 30s for a bit. Yes, there are children and a few older adults but that is a lot of young people. What's going on with them?
How has the population of young Nepalese varied over the years?
Let me walk you through this chart4… The darker bars on the left are the Nepalese in their 20s, the light bars on the right are Nepalese in their 30s. The height of the total bar above the x-axis is the total population but I have taken the liberty of colouring in the proportion of brand new immigrants in shades of green at the top of the bar. Underneath the x-axis you can see how many left that year. We don’t have data for immigration or emigration in 20145 and 20256.
Well well well. What can I say?
Recent migration isn't significantly driving the population of Nepalese people in their 30s: they are turning 30 in Denmark after spending their 20s here. Since 2023, the majority of Nepalese people in their 20s immigrated that year. Immigration figures from 2025 weren’t available but, by eye, I am guessing it must have been a couple of thousand.
They have real staying power, these Nepalese. They come to Denmark in their 20s and they make a life here. That’s something the DREAM analysis from last year highlighted as the key to Denmark’s continuing growth and success: internationals settling permanently.
It is being claimed that Nepalese students are coming specifically to take low paid jobs in catering, hospitality and cleaning. I want to see if there is any merit to the claim.
Employment sectors
First let’s see how high up the hierarchy they are at work7. For an idea of scale of these visualisation: nearly every Nepalese person in their 20s and 30s living in Denmark had a job in 2023.
Ahh, “Other” and “not specified”, my old foes. The boxes you can’t read because they are so small are managerial and leadership.
In their thirties, many are promoted to leadership positions although it is hard to see how often because of the mysterious data categories messing up the visualisation.
What sorts of jobs were they doing?
This is going to absolutely shock you but if you list the top three occupational sectors with a significant minority of foreigners performing them, you find that three of the sectors are in common:
I Accommodation and food service activities
(66.40% Danish participation)
N Travel agent, cleaning, and other operational services
(68.79% Danish participation)
H Transportation
(74.65% Danish participation)
So, what's the plan: stop Nepalese students from working in Denmark, so we can get Danes to take more jobs these areas? The assumption being that they would if only the wages were higher, right?
Except there is currently a shortage of catering staff, chefs, pizza bakers and hotel receptionists in some regions in Denmark8 and there are ‘good job opportunities’ in cleaning roles across the country according to the same source.
If they stop international students and their spouses from taking these jobs, who will do them?
Meanwhile, Nepalese people are also increasingly immigrating the “right way”, where they apply for work permits on the positive list and pay a processing fee of over 6000 kroner.
The Positive List has not been widely used for whatever reason but it is becoming popular with Nepalese immigrants. Maybe the solution to the entire issue lies in repairing this system?
I do take the point that wages can be depressed by people working too cheaply. How cheaply are we talking? What is the hourly pay rate of adults when you take holiday pay into account? These data are from 20239.
To be clear: I specifically excluded younger teenagers. I only looked at those who are paid hourly, which is usually the way students receive wages.
The average hourly wage (adjusted for things like holiday pay and so on), is 224 DKK
The industries that Nepalese people in their twenties find themselves working for are definitely low paid, especially for "Accommodation and food service".
It does make me wonder if there is a solution that could help everyone out? Why not force employers to pay fair wages? A rising tide lifts all boats and all that. They don't have to pay peanuts just because an Asian student is working for them. The fact that the Social Democrats are not the ones to suggest this ground-breaking solution of making employers pay what the work is worth makes me despair.
Not just that but it just seems so ungrateful. We need people to clean up, feed us and keep the hotels running. Nepalese people come, work essential but unpopular jobs, don't cause any trouble10 and make their lives here. They get promoted to managerial and upper level positions, with all the lovely income tax implications that entails.
Why not: Pay them more when they are in their twenties if you're so concerned about social dumping?
Might as well go after the spouses
Anyway. The Danish government knows well enough that it can't single out Nepalese11 people based on their nationality, so they must change the rules for all 'third country' students. That means they want to change it so if a student brings their spouse from the USA or Australia (or any of the countries that they happen to rate more highly than Nepal or Bangladesh), they too will be unable to work. What is the spouse supposed to do? How on earth is the couple meant to survive on one modest income?
They do know that 'students' are also PhD students, right? The people who come and do amazing research and make Denmark much more prosperous? 12
It just feels like they haven't thought this through. How many ‘headlines about students and researchers being pushed out of the USA by the Republican administration, then finding life in Denmark too challenging financially and taking their brains to Germany or Sweden’ before it is officially a shitstorm? Are they planning on making case-by-case exceptions? How sustainable do they think that plan will be once the news gets out that Denmark is not an attractive destination for academics?
Do the kommuner like what national policy is up to?
This might be a vote-winner for national politicians but the local borough councils are unveiling dozens of new initiatives to recruit and retain internationals. They are going after two groups “highly educated” (with a university degree, usually) and “highly skilled” (skilled jobs in lines where there is a lack of workers). They know they need health care workers as well as new blood for the knowledge economy.
Can they stand to lose the Nepalese? Will they have enough working people to ensure their growth and prosperity without them?
What will they do without mature students and their (usually), educated spouses?
At a time when borough councils are desperate for workers, this policy risks blocking the very people who can fill crucial gaps as well as being desperately unfair, poorly thought through and frankly udansk.
data source: statbank.dk/VAN8A, which if I understood the notes on the datasource: this is compiled by a sampling of the permits, and not a record of every permit given.
I’m not sure but maybe this is the resident permit for spouses of students.
data source: statbank.dk/FOLK1B
Didn’t download it, oops
Not available yet
data source statbank.dk/RAS308
data source: Arbejdsmarkedsbalancen.dk (Styrelsen for Arbejdsmarked og Rekruttering)
data source: statbank.dk/LONS40
there simply are no stats on Nepalese conviction rates for crimes. For some context, eight people from Japan were convicted in Denmark in 2023. If there were a non-zero amount of Nepalese convicts in Denmark in 2023, that number is LESS THAN EIGHT
and they say a similar pattern is happening with Bengali students as well but I haven't looked as closely into it. We are talking about less than 3000 people on study permits and there are no figures about their employment.
I got this wrong. If they are in a paid PhD position (which is the most common way to study a PhD), they show up under Work statistics. h/t Mohan Dev Sukumar