Denmark reduced the number of asylum applications that it granted to a record layer of 860 last year as a result of strictly new immigration policy, have revealed new figures.
For comparison: figures from the home office show that the UK granted a total of nearly 68,000 asylum claims in the year until June 2024.
The Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has pursued a 'Zero-Refugee' policy since 2019.
The country of around six million people received 2,300 asylum requests last year.
The number of people who granted asylum was the lowest registered, with the exception of 2020, when COVID-19 Lockdowns stopped new arrivals.
“Last year, the authorities granted the smallest number of residence permits to asylum seekers that we have seen in recent years,” said immigration -minister Kaare Dybvad Bek in a statement and called the figure “historical.”
While Frederiksen leads a center on the left coalition, the immigration policy of its administration and earlier governments have been influenced by right -wing parties in the past two decades.
Frederiksen told The Financial Times last year that the difficult approach to Denmark of crime and immigration, including deductible residence permits for Syrian refugees in 2021 and 2023, was popular with left -wing workers' voters.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has pursued a policy of 'Nul-Refugee' since he took office in 2019
Migrants, mainly from Syria and Iraq, walk in the E45 Freeway from Padborg, on the Danish border, on their way to the north to try to go to Sweden on September 9, 2015
“An unsafe society is always a bigger challenge for people without many opportunities,” she said.
Frederiksen met Sir Keir Starmer last month at No10 Downing Street, where the couple discussed the migration between a series of other issues that affect their two countries.
The decrease in the number of asylum applications granted by Denmark comes when the European Union prepares plans for how they will implement revised rules for asylum seekers to be operational in mid -2026.
Denmark has already succeeded in negotiating an agreement to keep it outside the common asylum policy of the EU, and Copenhagen has implemented a whole series of initiatives over the years to discourage migrants and to obtain Danish citizenship more difficult.
In 2018, the then government of the country brought in the so-called 'anti-ghetto law' with the aim of reducing the number of 'non-Western' residents in certain residential areas to less than 30 percent 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 Honor or Switzerland.
Critics destroyed the policy as discriminatory, while Dybvad Bek stated last year that there was a 'broad consensus' to reduce migration.
It comes after the neighboring Sweden reported last month that the number of migrants it had granted in 2024 had fallen to the lowest level in 40 years.
Denmark -Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (L) shakes hands with the United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London, United Kingdom, 4 February 2025
Sweden surprised the world by including nearly 163,000 asylum seekers during the 2015 migrant crisis – the highest number per head of a EU country.
But after a dramatic policy reversal, only 6,250 asylum-related residence permits were granted in the Scandinavian country last year, according to migration minister Johan Forsell, who quoted new statistics from the migration agency.
That figure does not include Ukrainians, who have received temporary protection throughout the EU.
The number of people requested in Sweden in 2024 was 9,645, the lowest since 1996 and a decrease by 42 percent since 2022.
