In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos’

[Independent voter]

It seems like over reaction to me. Isn't the ratio of minorities to whites very low?

In the US nearly all of our Muslim immigrants are working, are there no jobs?

Bolded interesting parts.






https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/07/0...t-ghettos.html

COPENHAGEN — When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”

Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.

Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”

That tough approach is embodied in the “ghetto package.” Of 22 proposals presented by the government in early March, most have been agreed upon by a parliamentary majority, and more will be subject to a vote in the fall.

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Rokhaia Naassan, center, with her back to the camera, resents the new mandatory preschool program for “ghetto children.”CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times
Some are punitive: One measure under consideration would allow courts to double the punishment for certain crimes if they are committed in one of the 25 neighborhoods classified as ghettos, based on residents’ income, employment status, education levels, number of criminal convictions and “non-Western background.” Another would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin — described here as “re-education trips” —in that way damaging their “schooling, language and well-being.” Another would allow local authorities to increase their monitoring and surveillance of “ghetto” families.

Some proposals have been rejected as too radical, like one from the far-right Danish People’s Party that would confine “ghetto children” to their homes after 8 p.m. (Challenged on how this would be enforced, Martin Henriksen, the chairman of Parliament’s integration committee, suggested in earnest that young people in these areas could be fitted with electronic ankle bracelets.)

At this summer’s Folkemodet, an annual political gathering on the island of Bornholm, the justice minister, Soren Pape Poulsen, shrugged off the rights-based objection.

“Some will wail and say, ‘We’re not equal before the law in this country,’ and ‘Certain groups are punished harder,’ but that’s nonsense,” he said, adding that the increased penalties would affect only people who break the law.

To those claiming the measures single out Muslims, he said: “That’s nonsense and rubbish. To me this is about, no matter who lives in these areas and who they believe in, they have to profess to the values required to have a good life in Denmark.”

Yildiz Akdogan, a Social Democrat whose parliamentary constituency includes Tingbjerg, which is classified as a ghetto, said Danes had become so desensitized to harsh rhetoric about immigrants that they no longer register the negative connotation of the word “ghetto” and its echoes of Nazi Germany’s separation of Jews.

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Mjolnerparken is, by the numbers, one of Denmark’s worst ghettos: 43 percent of its residents are unemployed, 82 percent come from “non-Western backgrounds,” 53 percent have scant education and 51 percent have relatively low earnings.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times
“We call them ‘ghetto children, ghetto parents,’ it’s so crazy,” Ms. Akdogan said. “It is becoming a mainstream word, which is so dangerous. People who know a little about history, our European not-so-nice period, we know what the word ‘ghetto’ is associated with.”

She pulled out her phone to display a Facebook post from a right-wing politician, railing furiously at a Danish supermarket for selling a cake reading “Eid Mubarak,” for the Muslim holiday of Eid. “Right now, facts don’t matter so much, it’s only feelings,” she said. “This is the dangerous part of it.”

For their part, many residents of Danish “ghettos” say they would move if they could afford to live elsewhere. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Naassan was sitting with her four sisters in Mjolnerparken, a four-story, red brick housing complex that is, by the numbers, one of Denmark’s worst ghettos: forty-three percent of its residents are unemployed, 82 percent come from “non-Western backgrounds,” 53 percent have scant education and 51 percent have relatively low earnings.

The Naassan sisters wondered aloud why they were subject to these new measures. The children of Lebanese refugees, they speak Danish without an accent and converse with their children in Danish; their children, they complain, speak so little Arabic that they can barely communicate with their grandparents. Years ago, growing up in Jutland, in Denmark’s west, they rarely encountered any anti-Muslim feeling, said Sara, 32.

“Maybe this is what they always thought, and now it’s out in the open,” she said. “Danish politics is just about Muslims now. They want us to get more assimilated or get out. I don’t know when they will be satisfied with us.”

Rokhaia, her due date fast approaching, flared with anger at the mandatory preschool program approved by the government last month: Already, she said, her daughter was being taught so much about Christmas in kindergarten that she came home begging for presents from Santa Claus.

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Barwaqo Jama Hussein noted that the government had settled many immigrant families, including her own, in “ghetto neighborhoods.”CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times
“Nobody should tell me whether or how my daughter should go to preschool. Or when,” she said. “I’d rather lose my benefits than submit to force.”

Barwaqo Jama Hussein, 18, a Somali refugee, noted that many immigrant families, including her own, had been settled in “ghetto” neighborhoods by the government. She moved to Denmark when she was 5 and has lived in the Tingbjerg ghetto area since she was 13. She said the politicians’ description of “parallel societies” simply did not fit her, or Tingbjerg.

“It hurts that they don’t see us as equal people,” she said. “We actually live in Danish society. We follow the rules, we go to school. The only thing we don’t do is eat pork.”

About 12 miles south of the city, in the middle-class suburb of Greve, though, voters gushed with approval over the new laws.

“They spend too much Danish money,” said Dorthe Pedersen, a hairdresser, daubing chestnut dye on a client’s hairline. “We pay their rent, their clothing, their food, and then they come in broken Danish and say, ‘We can’t work because we’ve got a pain.’”

Her client, Anni Larsen, told a story about being invited by a Turkish immigrant to their child’s wedding and being scandalized to discover that the guests were separated by gender and seated in different rooms. “I think there were only 10 people from Denmark,” she said, appalled. “If you ask me, I think they shouldn’t have invited us.”

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Dorthe Pedersen, center, a hairdresser, and her client Anni Larsen, left, live in the middle-class suburb of Greve and approve of the new laws for “ghetto” residents.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times
Anette Jacobsen, 64, a retired pharmacist’s assistant, said she so treasured Denmark’s welfare system, which had provided her four children with free education and health care, that she felt a surge of gratitude every time she paid her taxes, more than 50 percent of her yearly income. As for immigrants using the system, she said, “There is always a cat door for someone to sneak in.”

“Morally, they should be grateful to be allowed into our system, which was built over generations,” she said.

Her husband, Jesper, a former merchant sailor whose ship once docked in Lebanon, said he had watched laborers there being shot for laziness and replaced by truckloads of new workers gathered in the countryside.

“I think they are 300 to 400 years behind us,” Jesper said.

“Their culture doesn’t fit here,” Anette said.

The new hard-edge push to force Muslims to integrate struck both of them as positive. “The young people will see what it is to be Danish and they will not be like their parents,” Jesper said.

“The grandmothers will die sometime,” Anette said. “They are the ones resisting change.”

By focusing heavily on the collective cost of supporting refugee and immigrant families, the Danish People’s Party has won many voters away from the center-left Social Democrats, who had long been seen as the defenders of the welfare state. With a general election approaching next year, the Social Democrat party has shifted to the right on immigration, saying tougher measures are necessary to protect the welfare state.

Nearly 87 percent of Denmark’s 5.7 million people are of Danish descent, with immigrants and their descendants accounting for the rest. Two-thirds of the immigrants are from non-Western backgrounds, a group that swelled with the waves of Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian refugees crossing Europe.

Critics would say “the state cannot force children away from their parents in the daytime, that’s disproportionate use of force,” said Rune Lykkeberg, the editor in chief of Dagbladet Information, a left-liberal daily newspaper. “But the Social Democrats say, ‘We give people money, and we want something for this money.’ This is a system of rights and obligations.”

Danes have a high level of trust in the state, including as a central shaper of children’s ideology and beliefs, he said. “The Anglo-Saxon conception is that man is free in nature, and then comes the state” constraining that freedom, he said. “Our conception of freedom is the opposite, that man is only free in society.”


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Jan. 29, 2018
“You could say, of course, parents have the right to bring up their own kids,” he added. “We would say they do not have the right to destroy the future freedom of their children.”

Of course, he added, “There is always a strong sense of authoritarian risk.”

Ms. Hussain, the high school student from Tingbjerg, is accustomed to anti-immigrant talk surging ahead of elections, but says this year it is harsher than she can ever remember.

“If you create new kinds of laws that apply to only one part of society, then you can keep adding to them,” she said. “It will turn into the parallel society they’re so afraid of. They will create it themselves.”


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Correction: July 2, 2018
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect estimate of the number of Muslims in Denmark. There are half a million non-Western immigrants and descendants; the Danish government does not provide statistics on religious groups.

[Deleted]

Can't have subcultures in your own country. Assimilate or eliminate.

[Kaleredar]

Separating one year old babies from their families? That seems... drastic. And difficult to enforce.


Also:

European not-so-nice period

Is that what they're calling it these days?

[Raakel]

I travel to Denmark like two or three times a year since many years and I can totally understand where this is coming from. Also, as I work in shipping I had and have many danish colleagues (my current boss is a dane living in Germany..).

Danes have always been kind of "polite racists", not in a stupid mentally ill way, but they rather like to stay in their own danish cycles. They are mostly very homegenious and friendly towards foreigners but are kind of a closed club. You can't buy houses there as a none dane for example, or at least it's super complicated. It's hard to describe but I kind of respect how they are and handle things because it's a relatively small population. I love the country and while I'm on vacation there I often feel more free compared to Germany because some things seem more relaxed.

On the seperation of 1 year old I think that's going too far though. It's good that they take integration or assimilation seriously butwould a assume they can manage a smarter solution.

[Gully Man]

Saw this piece yesterday and rolled my eyes. Let’s take the first bolded point as an example. They make it seem like the children are being shipped off to some camp for brainwashing when it’s merely sending them off to play at daycare. In Scandinavian countries the women are usually back to work after a year and the kids are in daycare. The norm in these countries is for one year olds to be in daycare for 25-40 hours a week. Immigrant women tend to stay home with the children and have more children. I read somewhere that a third of immigrant children are still at home with the parents at the age of two compared to only 7% of Danish children. Why this is worse for immigrant children is they’re at home speaking their parents language and then start school behind their peers when they need to use Danish. The mothers are also not attending language classes while they’re at home with the children so their job prospects aren’t great.

Something that’s also not mentioned is Danish people living in one of these ghetto areas will also have to do this

[derpkitteh]

now THIS is how it should be done.

this is good, very good. if you're gonna take in these people, you have to make them integrate. if they won't integrate, ship them right back out.

[Vapo]

I cant believe they actually want the immigrants to become useful part of the society?! thats preposterous! Danes should just keep paying their welfare while parts of the towns turn into Danistans.

[Deleted]

funnily enough the "seperation of 1 year olds" basically means parents are required to send their children to daycare, it's kinda ironic that the wording makes it sound like they have to send their kids to some kinda reeducation camps because the general idea behind it is to give children a chance to assimilate (at a daycare), as many families with such a background want to live completly isolated from western culture and all that stuff (many being a relative term here, 5% of familys for something like this would still be many), in that sense the "seperation of 1 year olds" is more or less the "least racist" thing on that list, or at least the one with the most "well meaning" intent.

[Deleted]

Separating one year old babies from their families? That seems... drastic. And difficult to enforce.

Well drastic methods for drastic problems. It is a problem, that many Muslims still operate under the notion that women stay at home, and if they have a child the mother takes care of that child. They'll do that basically until they start school, which is 5-6 years. If said mother, doesn't speak danish to her child, don't mingle in danish groups and doesn't teach it our inherent values and societal standards, it is a massive problem that is hard to correct, takes forever and sometimes impossible.
This rule is to make sure that doesn't happen by yes, forcing them to put them in a daycare, so that they'll mingle and learn. Problem arises of course if it is a only Muslim daycare... Something that wasn't addressed, and I personally feel will come back and bite us.

Enforcement is easy, everything here has a paper trail, so only if they never ever visit a doctor and gives birth completely without assistance would we not have that tracked. And if they don't want to abide, well there is fines and economical intensives that can be withdrawn.

[Deleted]

Good set of measures all around, some are a bit extreme but if immigrants won't respect your way you don't have much of a choice. It's either this or deportation.

[Bakis]

Cant see anything wrong with this either. When Danes as many others take up the responsibility to harbor refugees they are entitled to demand thay they at least integrate.
Same debate here in Sweden just that we are 10 years behind Danes and still struggle to remove their wellfare if they dont learn swedish..

[CatchingFire]

It seems the concepts of integration and assimilation are so hard to comprehend for some immigrants that it must be forced on them. I don't disagree, Denmark is doing what should be done as a courtesy by the immigrant to their new homeland. This bending over backwards to accommodate immigrants will be the death of Western civilisation.

[Annamarine]

This is good but whats funny is if Trump suggested this he would be the next Hitler.

[Bakis]

This is good but whats funny is if Trump suggested this he would be the next Hitler.

Unlike Trump, Danes dont rip the babies from their parents all together.

[morpen]

That first part just isn't true.

They have to send their children to kindergarten, not to "be taught about dansih values"
This entire article is written to make it all seem much more extreme than it really is.

[Magnagarde]

While I can understand wanting to educate children when it comes European civiliation, behaviour and history, sending them to schools with other kids where they'll learn all of this under mandatory education, I find it absurd to make mandatory "Christmas and Easter" lessons.

This is a bigger violation of human rights than outright throwing them out of the country would be.

[Deleted]

Unfortunate but necessary . Islamic values clash to much with European values . If they did this 40 years ago the integration problem would not have existed.
Densest stop the left from calling this Nazi practices however despite them being wrong about integration for 40 years .

[Annamarine]

Unlike Trump, Danes dont rip the babies from their parents all together.

Your right they should throw the babies in jail with the criminal parents ... this is the better action.

[Gully Man]

While I can understand wanting to educate children in European civiliation, behaviour and history, I find it absurd to make mandatory "Christmas and Easter" lessons.

This is a bigger violation of human rights than outright throwing them out of the country would be.

It’s not mandatory lessons, the article is bullshit. Daycare is manadatory and at daycare all the children take part in Easter and Christmas activities during those seasonal periods. They’re not going to be doing lessons about the birth of Jesus Christ, they’ll be making gingerbread men or painting Easter eggs.

[Freighter]

While I can understand wanting to educate children when it comes European civiliation, behaviour and history, sending them to schools with other kids where they'll learn all of this under mandatory education, I find it absurd to make mandatory "Christmas and Easter" lessons.

This is a bigger violation of human rights than outright throwing them out of the country would be.

Know why I consider human rights to be useless as an argument? Things like this is why.