Foreign in Denmark

400 years of copy-paste

This is a special edition of Data in Denmark where I don’t talk about data but instead about a history book I am reading. We will get back to the usual programming next week.

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My library book is currently ‘Fremmede i Danmark’ (Blüdnikow, 1987)

‘Fremmede’ meaning alien or foreign, as opposed to ‘indvandrere’ meaning immigrant since the book is not just about people who intended to stay forever. I guess we would call them ‘internationals’ now. It is an academic history book that goes over the sociological and legal aspects of Danish history as it relates to people from abroad. This post might help you study for the citizenship test but none of these stories will appear in the questions.

Jewish Immigration (1600-1700s)

In Denmark, in the mid 1600s, there was a two-track system for people depending on which country they came from. Those from the east (so-called German Jews), had much more stringent rules than those from west (so-called Portuguese Jews).

There was famine in Lithuania and Poland in the 1600s and the Cossacks took out their frustrations on Jewish people during their revolt. Civil wars and pogroms, antisemitism and nationalism led to a huge movement of Jewish people from Eastern Europe towards Western Europe.

People with money or useful trades could get residence permits but the poor and ones with unwanted skills (e.g. puppetry), had to go from town to town across Europe. To survive, some turned to criminality while others converted to Christianity. Some became Hebrew tutors for Danish Jewish people.

Some of these people were refused residence permits several times. One man was fined and kicked out twice despite having a father who was a rabbi in Copenhagen. Another, a puppeteer, was refused residency.

In theory it was easy to limit who was in Denmark: if they didn’t have a lejdebrev (letter of protection), out they went but the administration of the document was somewhat liberal. In 1726 the processing fee was 1000 rigsdaler (about 70 000 DKK in today’s money?), but it was possible to get permission to come into the country without paying that. The fine for not having the letter was also 1000 rigsdaler (and also deportation). In the late 1700s to early 1800s there was a big push to get the poor out and ever tightening of regulations and procedures.

The American Revolution was useful to the Danish bottom line, which made Denmark more attractive. The administration of reporting illegal immigrants to the police and paying for their deportation was handled by the Jewish congregation, so they also had an incentive to increase the numbers of people who were not affected by the letter of protection system (so, classifying people there on legitimate business, married or visiting family). The fine eventually was reduced to 100-200 rigsdaler to increase the chances of actually seeing the money. Descendants of people who were refused residency were also arrested, fined and sentenced to penal labour as adults.

In the 1780s, people could pass through to other destinations such as Stockholm without documents which led to a tightening of the rules where people without permission to live in Denmark were fined and sentenced to prison (hard labour, bread and water, the works). If they couldn’t pay, the synagogue had to. The rules were tightened all the way up to 1814, where the king decided to give Jewish residents almost full citizenship status by applying for a new permit.

The introduction of the constitution in 1849 made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of religion, and so laws targeted at poor Jews had to be rewritten to apply to all foreigners. Grundtvig said at the time that Denmark was being overrun by foreigners and immigration was already too much.

Heath Colonists (1700s-1800s)

I assume you have all watched Bastarden so I don’t need to tell you about the 1700s in mid-Jutland.

Ok. Ok, but it’s on tv2 so get it watched. In the early 1700s, Denmark lost a shitload of territory to Sweden. This meant they potentially weren’t able to grow enough food to support the people in the territory remaining. So, Frederik IV made an offer to Danish people: go convert the marshes and heaths of Jutland into farm land and get a sweet-ass tax deal/free land. Danish people were not fecking interested. The land was not fertile at all. Mostly what you’d be doing was starving while trying to coax some food out of the ground.

Luckily for Denmark, religious intolerance forced German protestant refugees northwards. This suited Christian VI down to the ground because he loved Protestantism but they really couldn’t grow grain on the land because it was completely unsuitable for agriculture. The next king, Frederik V, took it really seriously and tried to solve the problem. Enter Ludwig von Kahlen, the ‘Bastard’ from the film, who had a plan. This was a plan that could not be solved with Danes, they needed, and I quote, ‘udenlandsk arbejdskraft’.

While we are talking history not repeating but rhyming, the places where these Germans were recruited to are the same places on the current map of Denmark where foreigners are currently keeping the working population stable (or increasing it), like Billund/Vejle, Ikast/Herning. Isn’t that interesting?

They came in the mid 1700s, and converted the land into something you could grow crops on. They experienced much hardship and were promised privileges and assistance from the Danish state. Then the tone on immigration hardened and suggestions were made to ship the ‘lazy’ ones to America and distribute their kids to the ‘right’ ones. The Russians mobilised and invaded European countries, so Denmark needed to increase its defence spending until Catherine the Great took power and stopped the madness. But the Danish state was in the hole over the situation, so they increased taxes even amongst those given tax free incentives to come as foreign workforce. Not only that but inflation made prices so much higher and the cost of living soared. de Hoffman suggested sending certain ‘lazy’ colonists back to Germany, to make standards of living better for those ‘promising’ ones who remained.

Rumours flew that all the colonists were getting kicked out, not just the ones that the Danish state didn’t think were productive enough, so a lot of people prepared to leave Denmark and didn’t get much work done that year.

In 1765, there was a drought that meant only potatoes did well. The Danish state didn’t like the idea of supporting all the foreign workers that they had attracted because it would have ruined them financially. Catherine the Great needed immigrants to work the land, and so it was more attractive to live in Russia under her rule so a lot of the foreign workforce moved there instead. There were also tensions with the local population in Denmark because they couldn’t get the same incentives as the Germans could.

The immigration policy of Denmark hardened and German immigrants were under the threat of fines and prison sentences for needing state assistance, so they moved on. The colonists had big families, so the descendants often needed to move off the heath and look for jobs elsewhere in Denmark because there wasn’t enough land to support them. By the late 1700s, the trend for colonist descendants to marry each other started to shift over to marrying locals, and thusly were the foreigners assimilated into the Danish population. In the mid 1800s technology improved to the point that the descendants of the original colonists were able to fulfil the plan of making mid Jutland habitable for 10 000 more families.

Enslaved People (1600-1800s)

Denmark doesn’t like to talk about it but they had territory in the Caribbean where they brought kidnapped people and forced them to work under dangerous conditions, under pain of death and torture. They also don’t like to talk about how sometimes those people would be brought to Denmark, and what would happen to them here. Were they property as they would be considered in the Caribbean or were they full human beings like everyone else living in Age of Enlightenment Denmark?

Some were brought to Denmark as exotic curiosities to feature in paintings, others as servants. In one case, a man was brought from St. Croix to Fredericia but his ‘master’ didn’t survive the journey so he was ‘left’ to the brother. He converted to Christianity, (big party at Michaelis Church), changed his name to Christian Glücklich, joined the army, married a local called Apelone Corneliusdatter, then moved to Randers.

This was quite common, this converting to Christianity, because once you did it you could appeal to the authorities that being sent back to St. Croix would threaten the salvation of your soul. Being a Christian meant that you could appeal to the authorities that you were no longer property. It didn’t always work but it was worth a try, right?

In the mid 1700s the anxiety grew that if Black people were allowed to live freely in Denmark, then Danish blood would be mixed with African, so the authorities limited the numbers of how many people with African heritage could be brought into Denmark. Temporary residence could be granted but it was important to the authorities that these people did not permanently settle in Denmark. In the mid 1800s, Ørsted judged that even though it was legal to own people in the West Indies, they were more in a servant-employer relationship on Danish shores. This also meant the descendants of enslaved people born in Denmark were born free.

By the mid-1800s when slavery ended in the West Indies, there weren’t many Black people coming into Denmark: just those sentenced for more than 2 years in prison so their influence on Danish society was minimal. The ones already here, had often married locals and assimilated.

Swedish Workers 1800s-1900s

Denmark in the mid-1800s could offer higher salaries and better working conditions than Sweden, so more Swedish workers moved here. Now, it was nothing new that Swedes would settle in Copenhagen but now they started to move to rural areas. It wasn’t just manual workers, it was also women and highly qualified men.

Living in the same kommune for 5 years could get you permanent residency, and the same rights to financial support as Danes under the poor laws but you couldn’t get citizenship without a special law, a processing fee and 15 years minimum residence. One year in the late 1800s, 6000 Swedes got citizenship which made the authorities tighten the rules so that wives and children wouldn’t automatically be granted citizenship at the same time.

However, Swedish people who needed financial assistance after more than 6 weeks unemployment were often kicked out. This affected widows and orphans too. The Home Office were ready to send an unaccompanied 9 year old ‘back’ to Sweden when her mother died, but this was blocked.

The Danish employers liked having a pool of workers who could be sent back to Sweden if there wasn’t much work goin. This really did piss off Sweden, as you can imagine. Denmark had to agree with Sweden that they wouldn’t kick out Swedes who had spent the last 12 years in Denmark.

Swedes had a reputation for criminality though it is not for certain that they were in fact more criminal than the locals. Mixed marriages between Swedes and Danes were more common than Swedes with Swedes, and thusly were the foreigners assimilated into the Danish population.

Seasonal Workers in Lolland 1800-1900s

Lolland needed foreign workers. Lots of them. Mostly in agriculture but also construction and the service industry. Danish employers liked having seasonal ‘guest workers’ that they could invite for periods of high demand and then send back to Sweden and Poland when there wasn’t much work to do.

This period in history coincided with the efforts of the Danish unions to secure better working conditions and pay. Having foreigners exploited instead of Danes employed under good conditions was obviously destabilising, so the unions and the Social Democrats worked hard to secure good working conditions for the guest workers, which made it less popular for the employers.

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When Messerschmidt mooted the plans to send people with foreign backgrounds out of the country or else into locked prison-like camps, I didn’t think “oooh, he’s got that from Trump”, I thought “oooh, someone knows their Danish history!”

The national fairy story is that Denmark was ‘homogenous’ until the 1970s when Turkish people showed up to do jobs Danes didn’t want to. Since then it’s been downhill with subsequent refugee crises. Bullshit. Sorry. It’s just absolute balderdash. Denmark has always had foreigners working here, contributing here and leaching of the state here. I am carrying on a proud tradition.

When people say “ooooooh, scary, in a few years we will all be replaced by foreigners!” meaning people like my kids who have one Danish parent as well as Danes like me whose whole family came from abroad as well as new immigrants from wherever, it makes me think they are being ridiculously dim. Do they not understand why people from Fredericia have French surnames, people from Amager have Dutch surnames, politicians from Frederikssund called Morten have German surnames?

Migration, my guys!

You were already ‘replaced’ years ago. The OG Danish people looked Mediterranean, came from Greece, they got replaced with the blonde, blue eyed chaps. On a long enough timeline, everyone gets replaced. It’s how countries work. Chill. The. Fuck. Out. They will marry locals, and thusly assimilate into the population. Their kids might look different, what with the lack of inbreeding that implies, but they will take on the cultural norms, add a couple new ones of their own and in a few decades they’ll be being horrible to the next newcomers just like you all right now.