Denmark: Proposal to ban Muslim migrants from becoming Danish citizens
Mette Thiesen: 'It should also be remembered that it is not a right to obtain Danish citizenship.'
Saturday 24 August - An MP for the conservative Danish party The New Right has proposed to ban migrants from predominantly Muslim countries from becoming citizens of Denmark.
MP Mette Thiesen wrote of her support for such a proposal on social media website Facebook stating, 'In the New Right, we would vote no to grant Danish citizenship to people who come from countries based on Muslim values,' newspaper Berlingske reports.
Mette Thiesen, 'New Right' party of Denmark
Thiesen spoke to the newspaper to explain the proposal saying, 'As long as the problems in foreign policy are not solved from the bottom up, you have to do something like this. It is simply purely practical. We can see that these groups are overrepresented in the crime statistics, and we do not want to grant them Danish citizenship.'
When asked if there would be exceptions made for Christians coming from Muslim-majority countries, Thiesen said that Christians could also be included in the citizenship ban.
'It should also be remembered that it is not a right to obtain Danish citizenship. We must only grant citizenship to those who we believe will benefit Denmark and who will buy into Danish values and who do not commit crime,' she said.
The MP spoke of nine countries of origin that would see a ban on obtaining Danish citizenship consisting of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. She said:
'We can see those male descendants of immigrants from these nine countries are more than twice as criminal as men in general. At the same time, we can see that the employment rate for these descendants is up to 25 percentage points lower than for Danes'
Even if migrants have been in Denmark for ten years with a clean criminal record, Thiesen said that they would also be banned from citizenship if they came from a Muslim-majority country.
The New Right is seen largely as being even more anti-mass migration and further to the right than the populist Danish People’s Party which saw heavy losses in this year’s national election.
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