Since taking office in 2019, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has maintained a firm stance on immigration by enforcing a “zero-refugee” policy. The country received 2,300 asylum applications last year, but just a fraction were approved. This marks lowest number of asylum grants given with the exception of 2020, when Covid-19 restrictions disrupted global movement.
"Last year, authorities granted the smallest number of residency permits to asylum seekers that we have seen in recent years," said Immigration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek, calling the figure "historic,” according to the Telegraph.
Although Frederiksen leads a center-left government, Denmark’s immigration policies have long been shaped by right-leaning parties. Over the past two decades, successive administrations have tightened regulations on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. In 2021 and 2023, the government revoked residency permits for many Syrian refugees, a move Frederiksen defended as being popular among working-class voters. "An unsafe society is always a bigger challenge for people without a lot of opportunities," she told the Financial Times last year.
The European Union, meanwhile, is in the world of finalizing plans to roll out new asylum rules by mid-2026. Denmark has secured an exemption from the EU’s common asylum policy, though, and has continued implementing domestic measures to stop the flow of illegals and restrict access to Danish citizenship.
One such policy is the controversial “anti-ghetto law,” introduced in 2018 and revised in 2021. This legislation aims to reduce the proportion of "non-Western" residents in specific neighborhoods to below 30 percent by 2030. Under these rules, local authorities can establish "prevention areas," allowing them to refuse rental applications from individuals who are not originally from Denmark, the EU, the EEA, or Switzerland.
The Danish policies are representative of recent trends in the area, including Sweden. Last month, Sweden reported that the number of asylum approvals in 2024 dropped to its lowest in 40 years. Sweden, having at one time accepted 163,000 people during the 2015 migrant crisis in a country of just about 10 million, had the highest per capita acceptance in the EU at the tine. In 2024, that number fell to just 9,645 people applying for asylum in the country.
