Across the graceful arc of bridge that spans the Øresund strait and its wind-feathered waves, Copenhagen is only 5 miles from Sweden and the port city of Malmö. Many days, the spike of Malmö’s tallest building is visible from the Danish capital, the twisting architectural marvel rising like an object of fantasy above the swaddling layers of marine mist.
But since 2015, the two cities have lived in very different worlds.
Migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and North African countries have come by the tens of thousands, streaming north to Europe in search of safety and a new place to call home. But Denmark and Sweden responded to the situation in diametrically different ways.
Why We Wrote This
Denmark and Sweden have taken different approaches to accepting immigrants. Their experiences may provide lessons for other Western societies.
As a result, the two countries have now created the Western world’s most dramatic dueling experiments not only on migration policy, but also on an understanding of multiculturalism and democracy.
With some of the strongest immigration laws in Europe, Denmark showed an unambiguous determination to keep migrants out. It cut benefits to asylum-seekers and passed a law that allowed authorities to seize valuables worth more than €1,340 ($1,565) from refugees to pay their food and housing costs. A court even fined a woman and her husband €6,000 for “human smuggling” when they drove a refugee family across the country.
Sweden, meanwhile, essentially flung its doors wide, accepting more than 160,000 migrants into a country of 11 million people. Looking at their Nordic neighbor, Swedes were appalled, calling Denmark racist and morally destitute.
Now, Sweden’s political parties see Denmark as a model.
Since 2015, organized crime in Sweden has risen dramatically, and nightly news programs are filled with reports of bombings and grenade attacks. As recently as 2023, Sweden had the second-highest rate of gun violence in Europe, and Malmö was seen as the epicenter. One Swedish commentator called it the “Swedish Raqqa,” comparing it to the former de facto capital of the Islamic State group.
In recent years, the far-right Sweden Democrats have blamed all these ills on the country’s former immigration policies. The party has also risen to historic heights, becoming an influential partner in the current government. Sweden’s policies, in fact, have begun to mimic Denmark’s.
The story, however, is not as simple as it might seem. The portraits of Copenhagen and Malmö since 2015 are complex. Together, they offer the world a unique picture of how opposite approaches to immigration can play out, with challenges and benefits on both sides.
And they reveal a fundamental question: How do societies balance priorities of compassion and order?
Many in Denmark and Sweden say neither country has yet found the right balance. But somewhere between the two is a bridge of a different kind. Not made of steel and suspension cable, but of the ability to balance care for one’s own people while also taking reasonable responsibility for those from abroad seeking a better life.
“Who decides who can get into a society?” asks Christian Albrekt Larsen, an expert on the Danish welfare state at Aalborg University. “Can those who live there decide, or do those knocking on the door have a right?”
For much of the Western world, that comes down to the debate over what should be done for Farzad Rahimi.
“The Swedish view is that everyone can become Swedish.”
Denmark’s migration policies are largely built around trying to keep migrants like Mr. Rahimi out.
He left India alone at age 11 and, after five years in Iran, arrived in Europe as a 16-year-old unaccompanied minor. Along the way, he was subjected to the trauma of watching friends being tortured by smugglers and a fellow migrant getting shot and killed at the Turkish border. As the son of Afghan refugees, he is also Muslim, a faith that has often clashed with the continent’s strict secularism.
In short, he fit the profile of migrants who, according to statistics, on average require more money and effort to integrate.
But Sweden didn’t care.
Before 2015, “There was a very positive government view on migration and protecting refugees,” says Bernd Parusel, an analyst at the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies. “It was not controversial in Swedish society.”
Partly, this was the Swedish view of Swedishness. “In Sweden, they have the idea of being so progressive that they don’t have a culture at all,” says Marilena Geugjes, author of the book “Collective Identity and Integration Policy in Denmark and Sweden.”
“The culture is human rights-, science-based – values everyone can obtain,” she says. “The Swedish view is that everyone can become Swedish.”
So why couldn’t Mr. Rahimi? The country welcomed him with a home and, at last, a measure of peace. And for a time, it could hardly have gone better.
“I learned the language and got a job and felt I was a Swedish person,” he says. To him, his arrival seemed a moment of divine grace. “Maybe God decided, ‘This is your country’ by stopping me that day.”
Then came the first encounter with drugs and the descent into violence and organized crime. “I didn’t have a parent to tell me I was on the wrong path. I was free – too free,” says Mr. Rahimi (whose name has been changed for his safety).
Before long, he was running drugs and weapons, ending up in prison four times for drug use, drug-dealing, and violent conduct.
He had become a part of Sweden’s new story.
Integration can be hard
Across the bridge in Denmark, fingers began pointing. As crime in Sweden grew, Danes felt their immigration policies were vindicated. Malmö became a cautionary tale.
As crime spread across Sweden, however, it began chipping away at the country’s sense of openness. Malmö was becoming a cautionary tale within the country, too.
“There was more crime [before 2015], but it was still perfectly manageable,” says Stefan Hedlund, a commentator and professor of East European studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. In 2015, “You poured gasoline on the fires. We imported a problem that we simply do not know how to handle.”
In 2017, President Donald Trump made headlines when he told a Florida rally, “Who would believe this, Sweden! They took in large numbers [of immigrants]. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”
All agree that there is truth to the concerns. Events in 2015 brought “a bigger population of young men with risk factors,” says Sven Granath, a criminologist at Stockholm University. “Data tells us there is a high overrepresentation of immigrants in criminal violence, both as participants and victims.”
But how widespread gang violence is – and how connected it is to migration – is open to debate and politically charged.
Gang leaders are predominantly the Swedish-born children of migrants who came decades ago. That suggests, to some, that the larger issue – then and now – is integration.
“Some people don’t feel like they truly belong and have equal opportunities, and so they are drawn to these gangs and an alternative career in crime,” says Dr. Parusel of the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies.
Could Malmö have done better? Perhaps. But the numbers were daunting. “It was a huge amount of people in a short time,” says Bodil Nyberg, a caseworker for a city anti-crime initiative called Krami. “The system couldn’t handle it.”
Integration can be hard. Sedat Arif knows that firsthand.
Malmö’s deputy mayor visits his old neighborhood
On a glorious late-summer afternoon, Mr. Arif is walking through his old neighborhood, Rosengård, in Malmö. Around Sweden, Rosengård became synonymous with the post-2015 crime wave. Gangs patrolled some streets after nightfall, marking their turf and questioning those who entered. One local social worker describes recent years in the area as “war.”
Now a deputy mayor of Malmö, Mr. Arif can walk through his old neighborhood and see a different picture. Gun deaths are down significantly in recent years, and Rosengård is tidy and brimming with activity – hardly a picture of urban decay. A man sits in a café, pecking away at his laptop as others chatter at tables nearby. A travel agency in the main shopping mall promotes trips to every corner of the Middle East, and a clothing store perches a kaffiyeh scarf atop a Swedish-blond mannequin.
Malmö’s reputation was always disproportionate to the actual threat, Mr. Arif says. But progress has also come through hard work. By accepting more refugees than other Swedish cities, “Malmö took a bigger responsibility, and that created challenges,” he says.
The unemployment rate here is high. Employers in the city are creating jobs, he says, but much of the migrant population doesn’t have the education or the skills to take them. He shares that it took his father 12 years to find a job after the family migrated from Yugoslavia to Sweden in 1990.
“Being unemployed for 10 to 12 years is disastrous,” he says. “You lose faith in yourself. There are problems at home.”
Things are better these days, and a program called Job Tracks is helping. More than 80% of participants in the city’s job-training course find full-time work, Mr. Arif says. Over the past four years, he adds, those receiving social assistance in the city declined from 10,200 to 6,100.
“I would be crazy to say we don’t have any problems, because it’s not true,” he says. “We do see the problems, and we need to solve them.”
Denmark, by comparison, has had far fewer such problems to solve. Partly to inform the nation’s migration policy, the Finance Ministry calculates how much different groups either contribute to, or draw from, the national budget.
According to its 2019 report, people of Danish heritage contributed €15 billion ($17.6 billion) to state coffers, while migrants and first-generation descendants from the Middle East and North Africa cost Denmark €3.2 billion. (See graphic on page 18.)
Despite this, both economists and refugee experts say Denmark could do more without unduly straining its system. The real question is one of priorities and values.
“It comes down to a political decision,” says Torben Andersen, an economist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Do you want to spend 2% of the budget or 5% or 10%? Whether you are willing to spend that money depends on your political and humanitarian viewpoint. If you look at the political arguments today, that’s exactly what’s going on.”
Denmark’s answer has been to be extremely selective about the migrants it takes.
In 2024, it granted asylum to 864 people – a historic low for a nonpandemic year. In recent years, Denmark has also accepted 200 refugees annually from the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. (As of 2023, similar-size Norway was accepting 2,000.) A new policy allows work for migrants from only 16 countries whose nationals are believed to be easier to integrate, based on likely economic contributions. (None of the countries are in the Middle East or Africa.)
This economic approach has transformed Danish politics.
The Danish left embraces immigration restrictions
For Denmark’s Social Democratic Party, 2015 had a significance beyond the migrant crisis. It was an election year, and the left-center party was, frankly, tired of losing.
Since 2001, the course of Danish politics had been largely set by the far-right Danish People’s Party, which proclaimed that Denmark’s once-liberal immigration policy had been a failure.
Voters clearly thought it had a point. In 2015, the Danish People’s Party finished with 21% of the vote – its best result by far. And for the fourth time in the past five elections, the Social Democrats were frozen out of power.
But the new leader of the Social Democrats, Mette Frederiksen, had a plan. No longer would the Social Democrats be the party of urban elites. Liberal Copenhagen would be largely abandoned to build strength in working-class towns and rural areas.
Now, the issue of immigration was key. Under Ms. Frederiksen, the Social Democrats would be as tough on immigration as any party on the right.
It worked. In 2019, the Social Democrats won the election, and Ms. Frederiksen has been prime minister ever since. Meanwhile, the far-right Danish People’s Party collapsed. In 2022, it won only five seats.
For liberal political parties throughout the West, Prime Minister Frederiksen embodies a problem other leaders are facing. Has she betrayed progressive ideals, or is she a model for how to get back to
working-class roots?
Charlotte Algreen is conflicted. On one hand, the Copenhagen resident is no fan of the Social Democrats, and she loves seeing signs of new diversity on the streets. But she also says Denmark needs to be clear-eyed. The Danish welfare state works only if everyone pays in.
“People from certain countries come here with a different family setup,” she says. “The women don’t work. Not that I don’t want to help, but it needs to be both ways. I think it’s really necessary that we have strong immigration laws.”
Eurostat, Danish Finance Ministry
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
Denmark’s welfare system is the country’s “crown jewel,” says Rune Stubager, a political scientist at Aarhus University. In a recent magazine article, two government ministers declared, “It is the Nordic social democracies that have created the best societies in world history.”
That idea has huge support among Danish voters, creating a kind of “‘Danish Welfare State First’ policy,” says Professor Stubager.
Ms. Algreen has felt the benefits. When her daughter recently had a severe injury, she paid nothing for the treatments. “If I had to pay for that, I couldn’t do it; I don’t have the money,” says the single mother, a widow.
Now, her daughter is heading off to college – at no cost.
“If we open our doors completely, our system won’t work,” she adds. “I see myself as humanistic, but we all pay to have this amazing system.”
Others go further. In Roskilde, a town of 51,000 a half-hour train ride west of Copenhagen, Holger Hansen waits with a friend outside the station. Smiles come easily to his whiskered chin as he laughs and talks about current events. Asked about Danish immigration policy today, he doesn’t pause.
“I’m satisfied with it,” he says. “We like to take care of people who have serious problems, not people coming here changing our policy and religion and society.”
The subtext is clear. Denmark has long worried about migrants – particularly Muslims – setting up parallel societies that challenge the Danish identity. For example, when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, many Danes were shocked at the backlash to what many considered basic free speech.
Mojib Wayand has lived with this tension almost his entire life.
“Why did I sell off myself to be accepted?”
Mr. Wayand and his family moved to Denmark from Afghanistan in 2000, and he acknowledges he was fortunate. His father, a doctor, was able to find work in Denmark. His mother got a Danish degree in pedagogy. Mr. Wayand attended Danish schools since kindergarten. Yet is he Danish?
Denmark’s view of Danishness is, in many ways, the opposite of the Swedish view. Danish identity sits uneasily with multiculturalism.
“They are a very well-functioning society, and the system works as well as it does because of their sameness,” says Ms. Geugjes, the expert on collective identity and integration policy in both countries. “They share values, and Danishness comes from history, and you can’t just learn it. You need to understand it, and to do that, you need to be a part of the society – you need to be Danish.”
There was a time when Mr. Wayand considered himself Danish. He says he has always been treated well. Even when he attended a private school and classmates openly talked about the problems with immigrants, he didn’t feel personal animus. They didn’t think of him as an immigrant. He was one of the “good ones.”
In high school, he went even further, partying and socializing in ways that weren’t consistent with his upbringing. “It’s a big part of the culture, and it was way easier for me to fit in and be accepted,” he says. “Culture- and religion-wise, you had to compromise your values for the Danish culture.”
But on this day, he is sitting in the orange light of late afternoon with a dozen-odd friends from DFUNK, the youth arm of the Danish Refugee Council, a private humanitarian organization. Some are wearing hijabs and some are native Danes, but all have come to be themselves without the weight of cultural expectations.
“The older I get, the more I realize I have different underlying values than many of the Danes,” he says. “I don’t want to go out every weekend to go drinking. I don’t want to go from one girl to the other. Why did I sell off myself to be accepted?”
Today, Mr. Wayand considers himself Afghan Dane. But he knows it is harder for other Afghans and Muslims who aren’t as culturally ambidextrous as him.
Tarek Kelani, the head of DFUNK, says it’s often the case that the more migrants learn Danish, the less welcome they feel because of the strong political rhetoric against immigrants. “The people who come here are very quick to recognize, you are not welcome. You cannot ignore it.”
He says, only half-joking, that it sometimes feels like Denmark’s policy is: “If we make it really unfriendly, they might want to go back.”
For Sweden, there is no going back. Last year, a third of Swedish births were to foreign-born mothers. But as national politics take large strides toward Denmark, Malmö is taking the opposite approach. It is leaning in to its multicultural identity.
Deputy Mayor Arif notes that, during World War II, Sweden sent 75 buses to Germany to provide freed prisoners from concentration camps a place to stay. They returned with more than 15,000 refugees – and brought them to Malmö.
Through its history, Malmö has taken in refugees from Chile, from Yugoslavia, and from Iraq, to name a few. This city, today with a population of 365,000, brings together 187 nationalities and 140 languages.
“For us, it’s about continuing the proud history of being a safe harbor for those leaving war and persecution,” says Mr. Arif.
As a result, Malmö is in many respects a glimpse of a new Sweden.
Malmö’s mix of cultures
It can be seen in the phalanx of hoodie-wearing gaming programmers, heads down, earphones on, everywhere throughout the city. Malmö has assembled one of the most robust gaming industries in the world. Half of the workforce is not Swedish.
“None of this would be possible without migrants,” says Peter Lübeck of Game Habitat, a workspace for gaming companies.
It can be seen on the bus, where one lifelong Stockholm resident says people are much more open. “I love it in Malmö,” says Rita Virkki, who moved here four years ago. “I can connect with people. You sit on a bus, and it’s easy to speak with them” – which she attributes to Malmö’s mix of cultures.
And it can be seen at the back of the Rosengård public library, where Maria Roijer furtively opens a door. As the library manager, she does not want to disturb the happy thrum of what is going on inside.
Huddled together in the dim light of a few floor lamps, native Swedes and migrants of all description are chatting during one of the library’s weekly “language cafés.”
Mrs. Roijer acknowledges that her library does comparatively little in the way of book-lending. Her staff members often joke that they feel more like employees at a copy-and-print store than librarians. “But that is what our residents need help with,” she says.
After several tough years for the city, she sees positive changes gaining momentum. When the language cafés were teeming with participants years ago, many of the students themselves became volunteers to help. “It was a very beautiful thing,” Mrs. Roijer says. Past café participants have come back to tell her they have become doctors or bus drivers. When she has her regular meetings with police, she has less and less to talk about.
“This is a fantastic place where you can test things,” she adds. “You can do really good work. You can help people.”
For Mr. Rahimi, Malmö is a place for a second chance. In his four trips to prison, he always promised himself that, this time, he’d get his life straight. He never did.
Then, this last time, he put his hand on the Quran and said, “This is finished.” In prison, he had heard about Krami, the Malmö program to combat crime and drug use. When he got out, he deleted all his old contacts and went to a meeting.
He’s now working with the organization to get on the right path. That means a job first, the paying back of debts, a driver’s license, and maybe even education somewhere down the road. Now, he is confident that he has the right kind of support. “If I cooperate with Krami, I know I will succeed,” he says.
For the first time in his life, he’s not thinking about money for status or for security, but to give back. Sweden, he says, has taught him that lesson.
“The emotion to Sweden is stronger than before. I am grateful,” he says. “The last few years, I have only taken from the system. Now, I want to give to the system. If I give back, God will give to me.”
