After they fled Iran decades ago, Nasrin Bahrampour and her husband settled in a bright public housing apartment overlooking the university city of Aarhus, Denmark. They filled it with potted plants, family photographs and Persian carpets, and raised two children there.
Now they are being forced to leave their home under a government program that effectively mandates integration in certain low-income neighborhoods where many “non-Western” immigrants live.
In practice, that means thousands of apartments will be demolished, sold to private investors or replaced with new housing catering to wealthier (and often nonimmigrant) residents, to increase the social mix.
The Danish news media has called the program “the biggest social experiment of this century.” Critics say it is “social policy with a bulldozer.”
The government says the plan is meant to dismantle “parallel societies” — which officials describe as segregated enclaves where immigrants do not participate in the wider society or learn Danish, even as they benefit from the country’s generous welfare system.
Here is more from the NYT, and do note that Singapore has its own version of this policy. I would make a few observations:
1. Putting aside the normative, analyzing the effects of such policies will be increasingly important. Economists are not especially well-suited to do this, nor is anyone else. I am well aware of the Chetty “Moving to Opportunity” results. That is good work, but a) it probably doesn’t apply to coercive Danish resettlements, and b) cultural context is likely important for the results. At least for the countries that migrants wish to move to, most will have their own versions of this dilemma.
2. “Open Borders” as a sustainable political equilibrium is looking much weaker than it did a month ago. The key question in immigration policy is not “how many migrants should we take in?” (a lot, I would say), but rather “how can we make continuing immigration a politically sustainable proposition?” Many immigration advocates are in a fog about their inability to offer better answers to that question.
3. Will this Danish action, once the entire political economy is worked through, increase or decrease the allowed number of migrants to the country? Looking at the demand side to migrate, will this policy end up attracting a higher or lower quality of migrants to Denmark? Is Denmark even attractive enough as a destination to get away with this? Or will it send a better signal to would-be migrants and thus raise quality?
I would not be too confident about my answers to those questions, nor should you be so confident.
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