Denmark seals gate to immigrants as numbers hit new low

As part of plans to make the country even less attractive to newcomers at a time when asylum numbers and overall immigration are already down, the Danish government released its 2025 Plan to introduce more restrictions on border controls. According to the plan, the Danish police would be able to reject asylum seekers at the borders in times of crisis like in 2015 when thousands of migrants sought to enter the country. The 2025 plan is seen as "unfair" and "a stain on Denmark's image," according to Local Denmark.

The Danish government seeks to create a statutory power to reject asylum-seekers at the border to prevent a recurrence of the refugee crisis of September last year, the Ministry for Immigration, Integration and Housing said. "We must be able to handle the pressure," Integration Minister Inger Stojberg said. "That is why we are now introducing an emergency brake so that we can reject an asylum seeker at the border."

Meanwhile, the number of people claiming asylum in Denmark hit new lows with only 36 people applying for asylum between Aug. 22-28, according to the Immigration Ministry report. Since the beginning of this year, there has been an ongoing downward trend in the number of registered asylum seekers. Namely, the number of registered people for the first week of January was 641 while this number went down to 269 in the first week of February. Some 25,000 refugees are expected to arrive in Denmark in 2016. According to a press release by the Danish Ministry of Employment, 17,000 of them could be transferred to municipality integration programs.