Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, The Copenhagen Voice, 18 March 2010

A political agreement between the government and the Danish People’s Party has ambushed the Irak Center set up by the daily newspaper Politiken. The agreement will prevent rejected Iraqi asylum-seekers applying for work and residence permits after getting employment in highly paid specialist jobs.

A political agreement between the Liberal-Conservative coalition government and its parliamentary supporters in the Danish People’s Party has ambushed the Irak Center, set up in November by the daily newspaper Politiken.

The new agreement, announced on Monday, will prevent rejected Iraqi asylum-seekers getting employment in jobs that pay 32,000 Danish kroner a month. This level of income means the Iraqis can apply for work and residence permits in Denmark under a special scheme that also requires the jobs to be done by people with special expertise.

Politiken said last year that the Irak Center will employ as many as possible of the 100 or so failed Iraqi asylum-seekers remaining in Denmark after recent forced repatriations of other Iraqis whose asylum applications have been rejected. The Iraqis will provide information about their home country and about the conditions for Iraqi asylum-seekers.

“We’ve decided to help a group of rejected asylum-seekers who have been caught up in the system,” said Tøger Seidenfaden, Politiken’s editor-in-chief, in November. “They’ve been living in a grey zone for years. The UN is still issuing warnings against sending them back to Iraq, and they have been unable to get residence permits in Denmark.”

The government and the Danish People’s Party said at the time that they would change the law to end “an abuse of the scheme to attract highly educated people and specialists” to Denmark. Those changes came earlier this week.

Four rejected Iraqi asylum-seekers applied for work and residence permits before Christmas after they had been accepted by the Irak Center as potential employees. Although the Danish Immigration Service promised at the time that the applications would be processed in a month, no decision had been taken this week. Stig Ørskov, another top editor at Politiken and also the chairman of Irak Center’s board, told the newspaper that he has few expectations the Iraqis will be given the necessary permits.

“The political signals have clearly been against our project and now they will legislate directly against such a possibility,” Ørskov said. “Although there has been no decision on the applications, we are greatly concerned that they will be rejected.”

In their agreement, the Liberals, the Conservatives and the Danish People’s Party referred to “a number of recent cases”, and then added “foreigners who try to abuse the rules will be rejected”.

“This agreement shows that the construction of the Irak Center was not illegal, as some politicians claimed,” Ørskov added. “Otherwise there would not have been a need to take these steps.”

“We will not accept that organizations or newspapers such as Politiken try to circumvent the intentions of the existing legislation,” Peter Skaarup, deputy leader of the Danish People’s Party, said in comments on the new agreement. “Therefore we are tightening the rules, so asylum-seekers who have been rejected cannot simply go to another office to get their stay here extended.”

Skaarup, who is also his party’s integration affairs spokesman, said in November he doubted that the Danish Immigration Service would give the go-ahead to jobs in the Irak Center, so allowing the rejected Iraqi asylum-seekers to get residence and work permits.

“The Iraqis probably do not have the qualifications to earn 32,000 kroner a month, so this will probably be an evasion of the law,” Skaarup said.

Ørskov added he now has difficulties in seeing the Irak Center starting its operations.

The new agreement tightens immigration regulations on 20 points, but offers a relaxation on one point: a foreigner can apply for a permanent residence permit after only four years, compared with seven years before the new proposals.

But such applications will be judged on new or stricter requirements, including a points system under which applicants must have 100 points deriving from voluntary work, Danish language skills, employment of at least two-and-a-half years and no criminal convictions.

Refugees who go on holiday to their home country without the permission of the Danish authorities will have their residence permit suspended for ten years.