Yes, dear readers, they're Danes. Aren't they great? [Geddit? Ed. ... Great Danes! Geddit now?] Every year, the World Happiness Report surveys numerous people from various countries around the world to find out which country has the happiest population. [Geddit? That's why it's called the "World Happiness Report". Ed. Geddit now?] This year’s winner is Denmark, followed closely by Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway. Canada ranked 6th. And the USA? Errr, 13th. And that was before Super Tuesday!
The lamestream media have been full of stories on the happiness of Danes, extolling Denmark's liberal democracy, managed economy, peacefulness and prosperity. What they don't mention, though, is the fact that Denmark's society is remarkably homogenous. As the picture shows, most Danes are white Scandinavians who share a common language, culture and religion. And their laws and policies and immigration and designed to keep it that way.
Just a couple of months ago, the Danish parliament overwhelmingly passed a bill to solidify Denmark’s reputation as Western Europe’s least attractive country for refugees. The law empowers Danish authorities to seize any assets exceeding $1450 from asylum-seekers in order to help pay for the migrants' subsistence in the country. It also extends, from one year to three, the period that those who are resettled must wait to apply for family members to join them in Denmark.
Why did the Danes do this? It's not that they haven't welcomed immigrants in the past. Over the course of the 20th century, the country of nearly 6 million became home to refugees and immigrants from the Soviet bloc, the Balkans, and beyond. Today, immigrants and their descendants account for 10% percent of Denmark'se total population. Denmark has also been a prominent advocate for refugees and asylum-seekers.
Perhaps that last phrase should read "true refugees and asylum-seekers", not to be confused with the bogus refugees and economic migrants from countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan [That may be stretching it a bit. Ed.] now making a pit stop in Denmark en route to Sweden or having missed the exit for Germany. In 2015, 21,000 people sought asylum in Denmark -- up from 14,815 asylum applications in 2014 and 7,557 in 2013. These are numbers that the Danish welfare state -- which guarantees free health care, education and other benefits to every resident -- is struggling to handle.
According to "How Not to Welcome Refugees" (Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2016), the Danish government last August cut social benefits to refugees and immigrants by 45%, in a move marketed as an "integration benefit". To ensure the message was clearly received, they advertised the benefit cut, as well as other government policies that asylum-seekers might find unappealing, in newspapers in Lebanon, which has a large refugee population.
More recently, the government proposed moving refugees from urban housing to camps outside cities, an initiative that would "shift the focus of government immigration policy to repatriation rather than integration". What that means -- in plain English (or Danish) -- is they want all the refugees and asylum-seekers to go back where they came from!
Sometimes the hints are a little more subtle. According to the same article, a Danish city council mandated the placement of pork on municipal menus (observant Muslims don’t eat pork), including at schools and daycare centres. That's quite a contrast with what the Germans are doing. See "German schools won't offend Muslims, drop sausage from lunch menus", WWW 7/3/16. Walt is investigating the possibility that Donald Trump is not a German Nazi, as his detractors say, but a Dane!
To return to the question of why the Danes are whipping the Willkommen mat out from under the feet of the Muslim invaders, the explanation is simple. It's what the Danish people want! One recent poll showed that 37% of voters opposed offering more residence permits to migrants. Another poll indicated that 70% felt the refugee crisis constituted the most important issue on the political agenda.
An official of the Migration Policy Institute -- an organization which does nicely out of being nice to migrants -- characterized the average Dane's attitude thus: "I want to protect the fact that my country, a small country, is an extremely wealthy country; that it provides these exceptional benefits to its people; and I don’t want to compromise my ability to receive those benefits simply because more and more people want to come in." In other words, "We're happy because we're here and they're not." Sorry, liberals, but that's human nature.
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