As an example, I know of more than one married couple with one Dane and one non-eu citizen that have been forced to live in Sweden instead of in Denmark due to troubles getting residency permits. Not letting a legitimate spouse get at least residency is just crazy.
1. Denmark has a very beneficial social welfare system.
If you break your leg in Denmark visiting, we will pick up the bill through our taxes (there is talks about changing that now)
If you get approved to stay here you gain access to more or less all social welfare.
Some people feel that this is being misused by immigrants. When they normally talk about immigrants they talk about arabs, africans etc. And there is some truth to that.
If you marry someone not from the EU they will gain access to all social welfare.
Because the nineties where ruled by a government that "just took people in" it created a backlash as problems started arising with ghettoes. This among other things lead to a (european style conservative) government backed by Danish Peoples Party a political party critical towards immigrants.
Since they secure the parliamentary power they have been able to get a lot of cases through.
One of them being the 24 year rule which basically is meant to hinder forced marriage between muslims living in Denmark and their spouses living in a country outside of EU.
This has been criticized by both left and right side of the political spectrum and is why some people move to sweden because they are much more lax about these things.
Personally I am a proponent of an open borders closed boxes policy and is voting for the only true liberal (semi american style) party that exist right now (form an ideological point of view) and I am sad to see every time people like Gus get's en trouble because of the splash damage that some of these laws result in.
Good thing is that Denmark is a small country and there is an election year. I am pretty sure that this will be taken up by the newspapers in Denmark and hopefully make it's way into the political debates on television. It's a perfect case for that.
I am also pretty sure Gus will be able to stay. The current government simply don't want to run the risk of angering their political base.
True. I am from another welfare state dealing with the same problems and discussions (The Netherlands). But it needs to be said that the system was grossly misused by native Dutch as well. Laws have been tightened since the beginning of this century, but some groups continue to be resourceful in exploiting the system.
Also interesting is that the anti-immigrant party is most popular in a low-immigrant, economically weak region (Limburg). It's highly paradoxical that people in regions that rely a lot on social welfare accuse others of bankrupting the state (immigrants, The European Union, and state officials are popular targets).
That is why immigration policy needs to be conservative - even if it means that you reject some people who would make excellent citizens.
You have to get it right the first time.
Are you suggesting that the immigration laws were made to catch/discourage a specific group of people?
This case about Gus is, sadly not a surprising story. The Danish authorities is with one hand constantly speaking about attracting foreign expertise, while pushing qualified foreigners out of the country, with the other.
Just last year, we attempted to get a 1 week visa for a Ukranian developer who was supposed to visit Denmark and meet with a client. We had to pay for a plane ticket and hotel in order to be able to apply for his visa. 2 days before his scheduled arrival, we got a rejection for his visa on the grounds that he was from a "high-risk" country.
Fingers crossed for Gus.
Every time I think about this, I get so pissed off. I am a textbook case of the Danish emigrant the politicians say they want back to Denmark. I work in technology and I make a lot of money; one reason I haven't worked in Denmark since I was a teenager is that no-one there can afford me. That said, I had seriously considered returning for good when I got kids. But the way the state has been treating returning Danish emigrants with foreign wives in the last decade, I feel the country has cut people like me off entirely. I don't feel welcome and doubt I will ever return.
Sweden is not always the best either, but at least spouses tend to get residency and AFAIK foreign expertise can typically get a work permit. Qualified migrants are such a net economic win, that I just don't see how one could actually be against it.
I am in a relationship with a foreigner (Chinese) in a country that has very strict laws on spousal visa (France). I dread the moment after we get married when we have to go through the whole process of the government checking if this is a real marriage...
Denmark is a tiny country, home to just five and half million Danes. Danish culture doesn't exist anywhere else. If it disappears, it's gone forever. You have to be more careful with it. What works in one country doesn't work everywhere.
This used to be true. It is no longer true. Now, many of those who move here fight to preserve their distinct culture, and to stay separate and apart. Thirty years ago, immigrant parents forced kids to only speak English even in the home. Newly arrived parents look for ways to have their kids speak their native language and stay within the group for their friends, saying, "I don't want them to be like Americans."
Among the various immigrant communities I'm familiar with, the "melting pot" ethos is history except in rare cases.
The situation is not remotely comparable. Most immigrants to the US were mostly from a Christian (or Jewish/Christian of you prefer) tradition. Only 0.6% of the US population is Muslim (0.3% in 1990). For comparison, The Netherlands has a 6% Muslim population (an much higher is some large cities).
I do not want to make a value-judgement of the Islam, but point out that some strains of Islam are highly incompatible with Dutch culture. For instance, more than half of our population is atheist or agnost, gay marriage existed for ten years, abortion and euthanasia are legal, possession/use of soft-drugs is legal, etc. Blending such different cultures is a very slow and hard process.
Note: I do not have anything against any religion (including Islam), as long as it does not attempt to revert secularization.
Edit: correct misuse of the word 'secularization'.
This leaves anti-immigration politicians with powers not of the scale of the problems they conjure. I think that accurate reporting and holding to account of politicians by the media would make a big difference.
A straightforward way to address this issue is to deploy a point system currently used by several countries, including Canada and Singapore.
I wonder why Denmark and the US, in particular, do not use this obvious sort of point-based system. There will likely be a massive 'brain draw' towards the US if this is implemented and specialized Startup Visa may not even be needed if the criteria/formulas are selected well.
In the Danish system, it looks like the criteria are not optimized towards its real goals and use non-optimal proxy criteria like EU citizenship to make decision on immigration. This creates many weird cases like this (it is obvious from his resume that Gus will contribute as much or more to the Danish society than an average Danish citizen, yet he cannot stay there) and many we did not hear of.
Note: It is true that the politicians needs to balance the issues of cultural assimilation with economic advantages gained from getting all these qualified immigrants (for example, the US might not want 2 million qualified Chinese and Indians coming in every year and form cliques within the country), but this requirement is easily satisfied by a good quota/bucket system.
I doubt very much if any of the must immigrant friendly countries like Canada and Australia would be pushing a bunch of social services on their immigrants and they are considerably more popular with highly qualified people than Denmark.
When I went back to Denmark (I left again thank you very much) with my foreign wife, we had to go through the most ridiculous deceitful process of immigration I have ever seen.
Then they wanted my wife to take that start hjælp money and press her into a cleaning job. I told them to stick their integration process and starthjælp up where it belongs and not bother us anymore as we were not there permanently and were specifically not interested in integrating in a bull shit society.
Plainly, to tolerate laws that explicitly discriminate against low-income and blue collar workers.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/apply-who-ins...
You spent 1 year in the past 10 as a fry cook or installing flooring? Great! Canada needs your skills!
The Australian list contains plenty of blue-collar jobs too:
http://www.workingin-australia.com/visa/skill-shortages/skil...
Genuine confusion here - are you taking the position that nations should not discriminate when choosing who they allow to immigrate, perhaps by preferring highly-educated immigrants?
There is much worse things in immigration policy here like the amount of money you need to bring with you to be allowed in. Were talking about 15k in cash to prove to the immigration officers that you have enough to survive without needing Government assistance in the first year. I believe this is per person.
Of course, folks from the Google's HR will tell you that there's a huge shortage of technical talent out there. Still, given the US education system's power, introducing points-based system might make more harm than good.
Denmark, to the best of my knowledge, had points-based system around 3 years ago. I just checked nyidanmark.dk -- it's not there any more. Have no idea why.
There are other Special Schemes for people who: have been offered high-paying jobs in Denmark (above ~$70k), who hold qualifications in professions deemed to be lacking available manpower, and a few other categories: https://www.workindenmark.dk/Find%20information/Til%20arbejd...
They don't because the obvious supporters of such a system have joined forces with the open borders folk and/or the "let in low-income/skills" folk.
Someone like this: http://www.ombudsmanden.dk/english_en/
The problem is that around ten years ago the current conservative minority government was formed, and to gain a majority they have relied on the right-wing Danish people party whose primary, and maybe only agenda is stopping immigration. This has lead to a political reality where the Danish People party has voted yes to whatever legislation from the government in return for further restraints and barriers for immigrants. They've used their position extremely well, and have used their platform to alienate immigrants and make them all out as devils in the minds of the people.
Ten years of this has unfortunately marked the country. The tone in the media is increasingly harsh towards immigrants, and other parties have started adopting the stance of the Danish People party since it's pretty successful - after all the Danish People party has had a decade to convince Danes that immigrants are only here to steal our jobs and use our social services.
As a result we've become a country of people that despise immigrants.
It's a very sad state of affairs, and this website is only one of many examples. I feel terrible about what my country has become.
Any links where I can see the Denmark Government's Point of View of his kicking (any relevant documents etc.)?
Danish educational institutions and companies go to a great extent to convince their surroundings, that they are international & business oriented, but the matter of fact is that this is not supported by the parliament. It is as simple as that. So don't get lured by their marketing. Stay out.
I'm very curious as to what impact this campaign can have on the Danish authorities. I would guess none if it doesn't get picked up by the Danish (print) media and since Gus isn't a classical victim (meaning poor, uneducated, a child and so on) I don't see that happening. Unfortunately.
That said, it's nice to see someone putting down actual work in creating a web site for a friend instead of the usual "create a facebook group" or "retweet to show support" which to me feels like the most lazy way to show that you care.
