Denmark Wants Migrants to Work 37 Hours a Week
Guess who’s outraged at such an unjust requirement?
By Hugh Fitzgerald
Denmark has done something sensible – and remarkably, its left-wing politicians have been the ones promoting the measure – by proposing that migrants be required to work 37 hours a week in order to receive welfare benefits. If they refuse, they will be stripped of their benefits and, presumably, will either capitulate and go to work, or leave Denmark, in order to move to another European country that might take them in, or to return to their countries – overwhelmingly Muslim — of origin.
A report on this commonsensical measure is discussed here: “Denmark proposes making migrants work 37 hours a week to earn benefits because ‘there are too many, especially with non-Western backgrounds, who do not have a job,’” MailOnline, September 8, 2021
Denmark has proposed making migrants work 37 hours a week to earn welfare benefits because “there are too many, especially with non-Western backgrounds, who do not have a job’.
Economic migrants in Europe – delicately alluded to as those “with non-Western backgrounds” — are almost all from Muslim lands: Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey. They have seen a good thing in the generous welfare benefits that European welfare states provide, and have flooded into Europe, by land and sea, legally and (mostly) illegally, characterizing themselves as “refugees” in need of “asylum” – one million of them being admitted, in 2015 alone, to Germany — in the hope of settling in the midst of Western Infidels whom they have been taught to despise, but who provide them with free or subsidized housing, free education, free medical care, family allowances, and more.
Many of these migrants have been quite content with all these benefits, and see no reason why they should be made to go to work to earn them. The unemployment rates for Muslim migrants all over Europe is many times higher than the rates for both the indigenous Europeans, and for other, non-Muslim migrants. It costs billions of dollars to support the tens of millions of Muslim migrants now in Europe, who are provided with subsidized or free housing, free education, free medical care, and more. That is money that is not available for other social programs, such as aid to the elderly. Danes, who had once been so naively welcoming to these migrants, have been mugged by experience, and now back a proposal to force economic migrants, after they have enjoyed three years of benefits, either to find a 37-hour-a-week job, or to accept whatever employment is offered by the government. They must now “earn” those benefits that until now they have been pocketing with such a maddening sense of entitlement.
The proposal by the minority Social Democratic government, a traditionally left wing administration that has adopted right wing anti-immigration policies, would require migrants who have been on benefits for at least three years to find work.
Note that it is the left-wing administration of the Social Democrats who are pushing this proposal; they see themselves as stewards of the welfare state, and do not want it to be exploited, or drained of needed resources, by people who never contributed to it in the first place, but simply arrived in Denmark to profit from its munificence, and while in no hurry to find employment, continue to take advantage of every benefit the Danes provide.
It [the Social Democratic Party] said the programme was necessary because many women of foreign descent do not work, especially those with roots in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.
The required-work program is necessary for two reasons. First, Muslim women are discouraged by their husbands and fathers from working outside the home. They are supposed to be homemakers, and to be mothers of large broods, demographically expanding the power of Islam, but not to go out to work where, conceivably, they might have to interact with male Infidels, and would certainly become more independent of their menfolk, and that would never do. The Social Democrats understand that Muslim women must be prodded, even forced, by the law to enter the workforce and at the same time,they need to be protected by the law from their husbands, who have been so intent on keeping them home, by making such work a requirement. Second, Muslim males in Europe have shown little inclination to find work; the benefits they receive are so generous that they see no need to work. They are unembarrassed about this. In their understanding of the world, they are living on what the infamous British imam Anjem Choudary called the “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance.” The benefits they receive from the Infidels – like the Danes – are a form of proleptic Jizyah. Now the Danes, both on left and right, are fed up with this state of affairs, and are about to institute a mandatory work requirement.
‘If you come to Denmark, you have to work and support yourself and your family,’ the proposal stated.
‘If one cannot support oneself, one must have a duty to participate and contribute what is equivalent to a regular working week to receive the full welfare benefit.’
The bill provides, for those unable to find work, the possibility of jobs – menial, of course — offered by the government. Everyone is thus eligible for employment, no matter how low their level of skills. As long as they put in 37 hours a week, they can continue to receive welfare benefits. But a refusal to work, because the job offered is not to a migrant’s liking, will not be tolerated.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has claimed the policy is intended to help migrants integrate into Danish society, with plans to encourage them to learn the language, but the proposal has been widely criticised as unfair.
Who has “widely criticized” the proposal as “unfair”? Not the Danes, who from left to right support it. It’s the migrants themselves, and their local advocates, who find it “unfair” that they should be made – after three years of idleness – to finally go to work and earn their benefits rather than continue to be supported by the hard-working Danes. It’s not a stand that has won many supporters. If it passes in Denmark, similar measures are likely to be proposed, and adopted, throughout Europe, where the same problem is found of Muslim economic migrants who do not wish to work.
The proposal by the minority Social Democratic government supported the proposal with the claim many women of foreign descent remain outside the labour market, especially those with roots in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey.
These are all Muslim lands. Everyone in Denmark knows it is not “migrants” in general, but Muslim males, who prevent “their women” from seeking work outside the home. But if they wish to live in Denmark, they will have to conform to Danish laws and Danish mores, and that includes the strict equality of the sexes that Danes insist upon.
The programme would start with those who are able to speak some Danish and they would be given skills training by the local government.
Not much knowledge of Danish would be needed for the kinds of jobs many of these Muslim migrants are likely to qualify for: sanitation workers, street sweepers, busboys, taxi drivers, stockboys, and suchlike. These are jobs that they could fill right now even if they can barely communicate with Danes. If some manage to learn enough Danish — language lessons are offered free by the Danish government — they could become sales clerks, or man telephone banks. Some could receive enough “skills training” to work as hospital orderlies or even as nurses; some could be trained in the simples of computer skills, to input information into databases.
What matters is not what these Muslim migrants do, but that they be made to do something, for a certain number of hours per week that in Denmark is considered to be full-time employment, so as to earn the generous welfare benefits that they came to Denmark to enjoy without planning to work. One more time: these include free or greatly-subsidized housing, free medical care, free housing, family allowances. The requirement that all of these migrants, adult males and females, be required to work at least 37 hours a week, will have good effects. First, those who remain unwilling to accept these new rules, and refuse to work, or to work for the full 37 hours, will have their benefits reduced or, ideally, ended entirely. Such a result should encourage some of them to leave Denmark, to settle in another, generous and still undemanding Infidel state or perhaps to return to their Muslim countries.
Second, the word will quickly go out to economic migrants thinking of moving to Denmark that a new work requirement makes that country suddenly far less desirable, and that they had best find other countries to settle in, where they can continue, without working, to live off the government, which is to say, the indigenous taxpayers.
No date has yet been set for the 179-seat parliament to vote on the proposal.
Although the Social Democrats do not have a majority, they would be likely to get support from centre-right politicians to pass it.
Though traditionally left wing, Frederiksen’s party adopted right wing anti-immigration policies when she took power in 2019 and is now targeting zero asylum claims.
I take this to mean that Frederiksen’s left-wing party is aiming ultimately to admit “zero” Muslim asylum seekers. And if “asylum seekers” are not to be admitted, then surely economic migrants, who do not tug at our heartstrings as some “asylum seekers” do, will also be barred. If such legislation is passed, it is likely to serve as a model for other European countries to emulate, countries that may be reinforced in their own attempt to halt all Muslim migration, and even to send back to their countries of origin those who refuse to work a full work week. It would constitute a revolution in European immigration policy: not a case of “fewer” Muslims being admitted but, rather, of none at all. And the work requirement, if it spreads from Denmark to the rest of Europe, will certainly cause some – perhaps many – of the Muslims already in European countries to leave. Particularly upsetting to them would be if they are forced to take the only jobs for which they are adequately prepared, that is, menial work that they deem, because they are the “best of peoples,” beneath them.
Frederiksen has blamed the crackdown on immigration on the need to protect Denmark’s welfare system so it can continue to accommodate migrants already in the country.
It is clever of Mette Frederiksen to depict her proposal as necessary “to protect Denmark’s welfare system.” New – largely Muslim – immigrants need to be discouraged from arriving, which is what a work requirement would do. These potential new immigrants, if not discouraged, would become at once a terrific financial burden on the welfare state (as Muslim migrants already settled in Denmark have been) so that native Danes receiving welfare benefits would no longer be adequately supported. The same work requirement that is to be applied to new immigrants should also apply to those immigrants – overwhelmingly Muslim – who are already in the country, and have enjoyed years of living on the Danish dole while feeling no need to be employed.
The proposal has been widely criticised as unfair [by the far-left], with Mai Villadsen, a member of the opposition Red-Green Alliance, branding the idea ‘foolish’.
She argued that it could lead to a downward pressure on the wages of other workers.
‘The foundation of our welfare society is a strong safety net,’ Ms Villadsen wrote on Twitter.
No, Mai Villadsen has it wrong. First, there will be no “downward pressure” on the wages of menial workers, which Is what most of these Muslim migrants will be, since the Danish government sets the minimum wage.
Second, the benefits of a “strong safety net” should only be made available to those who have in the past been contributors, through their taxes, to the welfare state. Those Danes who have fallen into economic hard times, through no fault of their own, such as small business owners forced to close during the coronavirus pandemic, or rendered obsolete through technological advances, as well as those who have special expenses (e.g., for the care of a child with a disability), and those Danes who are elderly, and after decades of work find upon retirement that their pensions prove insufficient, are the people who have earned the right to be supported by a “strong safety net.” Those who have arrived, as economic migrants, to take full advantage of a welfare system to which they have not contributed one thin dime or kroner, have no reason to complain when a work requirement is imposed on them, and that only after three years of willed idleness have passed. The “safety net” needs to be paid for; the migrants who refuse to work, even at the simplest jobs, are leaching the welfare system of revenue it needs for those Danes who have paid for decades into the system.
The proposal was tabled by the Social Democratic government who claim women of foreign descent remain outside the labor market.
Women’s equality for Muslim women includes the right to join the labor market, to work outside the home, to have all the rights that Danish women possess. Muslim women seem far readier to work than Muslim men; for the women, working is not merely a source of income but provides the sense of independence that they long for, and that in Muslim countries is denied them.
The Social Democratic government stated in the proposal, ‘if you come to Denmark, you have to work and support yourself and your family.”
Could anyone except the Muslims be outraged by such an obvious requirement? Nothing could be fairer, nor more infuriating to Muslims who believe the world of Infidels owes them a living.
If there are not enough 37-hour-per-week jobs available from private employers, it is not beyond the ability of the public sector – the various governmental agencies – to offer full-time jobs, albeit menial ones, to migrants. And of course, it is possible that migrants could take on more than one job – many Americans work two or three jobs to make ends meet – to fulfill the 37-hour requirement.
What should we call this insistence of the Social Democrats in Denmark, that “if you come to Denmark, you have to work and support yourself and your family”?
I’d call it Common Sense.