Will Stancil vs. John Rawls

Far right political parties are on the upsurge due to voter discontent over immigration ... but not in Denmark, where the mainstream parties stole their best ideas.

People ask me what I think of Will Stancil.

Well, I like him. The kid’s got moxie. He’s taken more straight shots to the jaw than Rocky Balboa, but he keeps picking himself up off the Twitter canvas and throwing more hopeless haymakers. For example,

What's the over-under betting line until the day when poor Will Stancil comes out of the liberal closet? When will he announce: "Aw, to hell with it, if Sailer keeps sounding smart, authoritative, funny, and savvy, well, then Occam's Razor suggests he is smart, authoritative, funny, and savvy"?

Psssssssst ... hey, Will ... Lemme let you in on the secret policy lever by which the Danish Social Democrats undermined the electoral appeal of the far right: they adopted many of the far right's good ideas for restricting immigration.

The newspapers today are full of the European Parliament election results on the Continent. (Unlike California, which takes four to five weeks to count the balloting, Europeans manage to get it over and done within a small fraction of that duration.)

In Germany, the Alliance for Germany party, which is constantly denounced as a threat to democracy by Germany’s deep state and Establishment authoritarians who want to abolish it to keep voters from democratically casting their ballots for it, came in second with 16% of the vote, up from 7% two elections ago in 2014 before Merkel’s Boner in 2015, when German chancellor Angela Merkel invited a million military-age marching Muslims into Europe. In France, the National Rally party of Marie Le Pen won 31%, up from 25% a decade ago, leading President Macron to call for snap elections.

In contrast, the Danish People’s Party won only 7% of the vote in Denmark, down from 27% in 2014. This is partly because there’s a new, more respectable immigration restrictionist party, the Denmark Democrats, that split off from Venstre, the main center-right party, and partly because the other parties stole the DPP’s best issue, immigration, by … passing laws cracking down on immigration that were favored by the voters.

That sounds to me like democracy in action, but I’m of course some kind of wild-eyed extremist who admires the Danish reform of their immigration laws.

That’s why you never hear anymore about how democracy is under threat from the extremist far right Danish People’s Party: because first the Danish center-right parties and then the Danish center-left came on board on the need to regulate immigration much more prudently. Denmark didn’t want to become Sweden by continuing to be a sucker for hard luck stories from the Muslim world (and lately, since Merkel’s Debacle in 2015, even the Swedes have moved to the right on immigration).

The Danish Establishment now publicly believes in both sides of Rawlsianism: a welfare state to even out accidents of birth among Danes — as Scandophile American political philosopher John Rawls suggested in his famous book A Theory of Justice — and immigration restrictionism to keep the rest of the world from over-running Denmark’s otherwise fairly leftist utopia (as Rawls made clear two decades later in The Law of Peoples:

Concerning the second problem, immigration, in #4.3 I argue that an important role of government, however arbitrary a society’s boundaries may appear from a historical point of view, is to be the effective agent of a people as they take responsibility for their territory and the size of their population, as well as for maintaining the land’s environmental integrity. Unless a definite agent is given responsibility for maintaining an asset and bears the responsibility and loss for not doing so, that asset tends to deteriorate. On my account the role of the institution of property is to prevent this deterioration from occurring. In the present case, the asset is the people’s territory and its potential capacity to support them in perpetuity; and the agent is the people itself as politically organized. The perpetuity condition is crucial. People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing to regulate their numbers or to care for their land by conquest in war, or by migrating into another people’s territory without their consent.

From Wikipedia:

Starting from the late 1980s gradually more restrictions were introduced into Danish immigration policy, in particular after 2001, when a coalition government of the Liberal Party (Venstre) and the Conservative People's Party took over from the preceding Social Democratic/Social Liberal government coalition.^[4]

In 2002, a new policy stipulated that spouses must be 24 years of age or older in order to qualify for spouse reunification, now commonly referred to as the 24-year rule.

This was a way to crack down on a Muslim immigrant paterfamilias’ badgering his young daughters into an arranged marriage with a cousin back in the Old Country to get more members of the clan into the welfare paradise of Denmark. Of course, cousin marriages can lead to nasty birth defects, but the Danish taxpayers will subsidize a lifetime of care, so what’s the problem?

In addition, the Danish immigration authorities were tasked with assessing if each member of the couple applying for spouse reunification had a greater attachment to Denmark or to another nation. Spouse reunification was denied to any applicants who had received Danish social assistance within a year of their application and the person already residing in Denmark was required to provide bank documentation that he or she could provide financial collateral for public expenses to support his or her partner. A housing requirement mandated a space of 20 square meters per person in the accommodations provided by the current resident of Denmark.^[14] As a result of these policy changes, the number of family reunification permits granted fell from 13,000 in 2001 to less than 5,000 in 2005.^[15]

2010s

According to a 2012 report published by the Danish Immigration Service, the most common reasons for receiving a Danish residence permit were:

1. 54% Immigrating under the European Union and European Economic Area rules of free movement

2. 19% International students

3. 8% Labor Migrants with work permits

4. 6% Family reunification

5. 5% Asylum seekers.^[16]

In the 2010s, the hold period for a family reunification was extended from one year to three, social welfare for asylum seekers was reduced, the duration of temporary residence permits decreased and efforts to deport rejected asylum claimants intensified.^[17]

By 2017 the character of immigration had changed from 20 years earlier. Whereas in 1997 individuals with asylum claims and family reunification with non-Nordic citizenship constituted about half the immigrants, in 2017 the majority (65%) was composed of international students and labour migrants whereas family reunification accounted for 13% of immigrants.^[18]

In 2019 more people with a refugee background emigrated from Denmark than immigrated, for the first time since 2011 with a difference of 730 people according to Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet (UIM) figures.^[19]

Paradigm shift

In the period 2019-2023, the government led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen made migration policy still stricter.^[20][21] This change of direction is known in Denmark as the 'Paradigm shift'.^[22] The focus was shifted from integration to return to the countries of origin. In March 2021, the Danish government stated that it would revoke the residency permits for Syrian refugees and deport them back to Syria,^[23] becoming the first European country and EU member state to initiate the transition as they revoked 94 Syrians of residency permits.^[23][24] In 2022, the then Minister of Integration, Mattias Tesfaye, himself the son of an Ethiopian refugee, said the following: "If you look at the historical background, it is completely normal that left-wing politicians like me are not against migration, but want it to be under control. If it isn't - and it wasn't since the 1980s - low-income and low-educated people pay the highest price for poor integration. It is not the wealthy neighborhoods that have to integrate most of the children. On the contrary, the areas where the traditional social democratic voters and trade unionists live face the greatest problems."^[25][26]

In January 2021, prime minister Mette Frederiksen announced that immigration should be limited so it would not threaten the social cohesion of Danish society, which was already under strain, and added that the number of migrants had a strong impact on achieving integration of immigrants. In practice, this meant that the government would actively oppose what it considered the anti-democratic values practiced in Denmark by migrants from Muslim countries.^[27]

Has Denmark turned into a Nazi dystopia from imposing sensible restrictions on immigration over the last 23 years?

Of course not.

It turns out that there really is a Secret Policy Lever: do what the Danes did.