Denmark grants ‘historic’ low asylum requests in 2024

COPENHAGEN: Denmark´s strict immigration policies resulted in the granting of just 860 asylum requests last year, the lowest number with the exception of 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns halted new arrivals.

Denmark´s immigration approach has been influenced by the far-right parties for over 20 years, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the head of the Social Democrats, pursuing a “zero refugee” policy since coming to power in 2019.

The country of around six million people registered 2,300 asylum requests last year. “Last year, authorities granted the smallest number of residency permits to asylum seekers that we have seen in recent years,” Immigration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek said in a statement, calling the figure “historic”.

The decline comes as the European Union is preparing plans on how they will implement overhauled rules for asylum seekers to be operational in mid-2026. Denmark has already managed to negotiate an agreement to keep it outside the EU´s common asylum policy, and Copenhagen has over the years implemented a slew of initiatives to discourage migrants and made Danish citizenship harder to obtain.