Invisible Unemployment
How Many Accompanying Partners in Denmark Can’t Find Jobs?
I have lived in Denmark since 2008 so I have seen a lot of people come and go in my time. Many of my international friends were married-to-a-Dane and they talked a lot about the struggles to get a job here. The job market is rough for outsiders.
The biggest eye-opener for me was attending night school for highly educated immigrant women to re- or up-skill into tech jobs. Imagine being in a room of 90 women and the majority have the same story: “I came here with my partner. I can’t find a job”1.
Only recently has this phenomenon started to get real attention. First with Lyndsay Jensen’s LinkedIn hashtag #TheForgottenGold (full story here: Denmark’s Forgotten Gold) and also on Last Week in Denmark2
But what do we actually know? How many people are we talking about here?
The stats tell us a lot but they do not tell us everything. Some stats only talk about Western/non-Western, some stats only talk about EU, some only about EU minus Nordic, some just “immigrant” populations.
I made a valiant attempt to try to quantify this issue and I need to be straight with you from the up: most of this relies on inference and if an underlying assumption is wrong, the rest of the logic goes a bit wonky like statistical Jenga. This is a dual purpose estimate and a plea for real data.
I researched EU (but not Nordic) migrants who brought a partner with them3. How many of these partners have jobs? One dodgy assumption is that if an EU worker brings a partner, this partner is also from the EU. I have no idea how to check that against reality. Another potentially dodgy assumption is that these partners even want a job. Maybe their partner earns so much money, they are happy to have a career break or whatever?
The data available mean that I am not able to make comments on some other very interesting groups: people from BRIC countries, people from North America and Australia, people married to Danes from any country. No idea what is going on with them.
With my conscience thusly absolved of misleading anyone with lies, damn lies and statistics….
In 2025, EU (but not Nordic) immigrants had the above breakdown in their first EU residence permit in Denmark4. (43% work permits, 17% study permits 26% “other” (I think that must mean “family” because the 14% “misc” are all the other categories such as asylum, family reunification, au pair)).
This is for all age-groups, you cannot disaggregate for age in this dataset. *sigh*
Where you can disaggregate for age is in https://statbank.dk/FOLK1B and the lion’s share of EU immigrants are between the ages of 20 and 64: 200 000 of them! A fifth are not working age.
But how many are in full time work? For that I needed to go to a different data source on jobindsats.dk and found that 73 341 people on any sort of EU work permit have full time jobs (60 334 of which are the people with EU work residence permits, not family or other or misc)
That is a lot of people, right? But not everyone wants (or can) work full time. If you’re a student, for example, the rules are strict about how many hours you are allowed to work. So, this is where we need to take a bit of a wild leap into guess work to figure out how many family members of working age are not working full time.
If we use the stats from the beginning of 17% students, 14% “misc”, then are the remainder family? I think they might be.
And those are working age adults in the above graph, so we’re not lumping in a bunch of out-of-work five year olds here. A weakness of my argument is that in the pie chart, 26% are here on “other” EU permits and about a fifth of them will not be working age looking at the national stats of working age vs. child and retirement age.
My guess is to say that around 20% of people on all EU (but not Nordic) permits are probably partners, so about 40% of the non-working EU5 adults.
I have generated and re-generated the above graphic a dozen times now because I want to get this as right as I can. I do not want to under- or over- state the issue. I want something we can grip hold of and use to get to the next hand-hold.
It is my guess that there are around 40 000 EU migrants who accompanied their partners to Denmark and do not have full time jobs. Some of them might not want a full time job because they have other things going on with their lives but those sorts of circumstances tend to be unusual in working age people.
Based on what I’ve seen in those night school classes and hearing the same story again and again, I believe that the majority of these people would love to work full time.
So, what’s stopping them and how do we get them into gainful employment?
The next most common story: “I am married to a Dane. I can’t find a job.”
I wish we’d had publications like this in 2008!
I looked at a sub-set of a sub-set of a sub-set because those were the data available so I didn’t have to get too hand-wavy when comparing different years or cohorts.
Source: https://statbank.dk/indoph2
(but not Nordic!)
I know many such cases and it is quite sad that even with strong experience and a desire to join the job market, is it an extremely tough situation.