Denmark reduced the number of asylum requests it granted to a record low of 860 last year as a result of strict new immigration policies, new figures have revealed.
In comparison, Home Office figures show that the UK – which has a population ten times that of Denmark – granted a total of almost 68,000 asylum claims in the year to June 2024.
Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen has pursued a ‘zero-refugee’ policy since taking office in 2019.
The country of about six million people received 2,300 asylum requests last year.
The number of people granted asylum was the lowest on record with the exception of 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns halted new arrivals.
‘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’.
While Frederiksen heads a centre-left coalition, the immigration policies of her administration and previous governments have been influenced by right-wing parties for the last two decades.
Frederiksen told the Financial Times last year that Denmark’s tough approach to crime and immigration, which included revoking residency permits for Syrian refugees in 2021 and 2023, was popular with left-leaning working-class voters.
Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen has pursued a ‘zero-refugee’ policy since taking office in 2019
Migrants, mainly from Syria and Iraq, walk at the E45 freeway from Padborg, on the Danish-German border, heading north to try to get to Sweden on September 9, 2015
‘An unsafe society is always a bigger challenge for people without a lot of opportunities,’ she said.
Frederiksen last month met with Sir Keir Starmer at No10 Downing Street where the pair discussed migration among a range of other issues affecting their two countries.
The decline in the number of asylum applications being granted by Denmark 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.
In 2018, the country’s then-government brought in the so-called ‘anti-ghetto law’ with the aim of reducing the number of ‘non-Western’ residents in certain housing areas to less than 30 per cent by 2030.
The laws, which were updated in 2021, gave local authorities the right to set up ‘prevention areas’ where they can refuse to rent to those who are not originally from Denmark, the EU or EEA or Switzerland.
Critics have blasted the policies as discriminatory, while Dybvad Bek insisted last year that there was a ‘broad consensus’ towards reducing migration.
It comes after neighbouring Sweden reported last month that the number of migrants it granted asylum in 2024 had dropped to the lowest level in 40 years.
Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (L) shakes hands with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London, United Kingdom, 04 February 2025
Sweden stunned the world by taking in nearly 163,000 asylum seekers during the 2015 migrant crisis – the highest number per capita of any EU country.
But following a dramatic policy reversal, just 6,250 asylum-related residence permits were granted in the Scandinavian country last year, according to Migration Minister Johan Forssell, who cited fresh statistics from the Migration Agency.
That figure does not include Ukrainians, who have been granted temporary protection throughout the EU.
The number of people who applied for asylum in Sweden in 2024 was 9,645, the lowest since 1996 and down by 42 percent since 2022.
