How Denmark is Quietly Ending Multiculturalism

Denmark has built one of the toughest immigration systems in Europe. Over the past two decades, the country has tightened its borders, restricted family reunification, demolished apartment blocks in troubled neighborhoods, banned the burqa and niqab in public spaces, targeted radical preachers, and introduced policies designed to dismantle what the government calls “parallel societies.” But what makes Denmark’s story so unusual is not simply how far these policies have gone. It is who ultimately embraced them. Many of Denmark’s toughest immigration policies were adopted, preserved, or expanded by the Social Democrats — the same political movement that helped build the country’s famous welfare state and that, for decades, represented many of the values associated with progressive Europe. Instead of abandoning the restrictive policies introduced by previous center-right governments, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen made them a central part of her own political project. Her argument was simple: controlling immigration was not incompatible with protecting the welfare state. It was necessary to preserve it. In this video, we explore how Denmark went from being considered one of Europe’s most open, tolerant, and liberal societies to becoming a model for strict immigration control. We trace the story from the first major restrictions on family reunification and the Muhammad cartoon crisis, through the 2015 European migration crisis, the controversial “ghetto” policies, the fight against radical Islamist preachers, and Denmark’s attempt to dismantle parallel societies. We also examine how these policies transformed Danish politics. Rather than destroying the Social Democrats electorally, their tougher position on immigration helped them reclaim political territory that had previously belonged to the populist right. The party returned to power in 2019 and achieved its best election result in more than two decades in 2022. Meanwhile, asylum applications fell dramatically, from more than 21,000 during the 2015 migration crisis to just 1,628 in 2025. But Denmark’s transformation did not stop at its borders. Its political experiment has increasingly attracted attention from parties across Europe, including politicians on the center-left who once considered strict immigration policies politically impossible. This is the story of how Denmark fundamentally changed its approach to immigration, integration, political Islam, and the welfare state — and how a small Scandinavian country helped change the immigration debate across Europe.