COPENHAGEN JOURNAL
Wedding Vows Can Lock Danes Out of Their Homeland

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: September 10, 2004


COPENHAGEN, Sept. 7 - When Signe Norgaard Nielsen and Franklin Lamot
Lescaille met in Havana about three years ago, it did not take them long to fall in
love and decide to get married. What has become a lengthy ordeal for the couple
began when the pair applied to live in Denmark, the country where Signe and
her ancestors were born.

Their application was rejected by the Danish authorities, who were acting in
accordance with a set of laws on immigration that, the laws' opponents say,
are the toughest in the entire 25-member European Union and that have produced a
strange and unwanted result.

According to Sweden, the new laws have led about 1,000 mixed Danish-foreign
couples, barred from setting up households in Denmark, to live across the
strait between Copenhagen and Sweden. In many cases, the Danish partner crosses the
long causeway bridge from Malmo to Copenhagen every day, or takes the ferry,
as Ms. Nielsen did for a year and a half, from Helsingborg in Sweden to
Helsingor in Denmark, to work or study.

The bridge was called the Love Bridge by The Economist, which carried an
account of the situation a couple of months ago, though the term does not seem to
have caught on among the couples actually living lives divided between two
countries, but they do have strong feelings about the law and its consequences.

"I haven't done anything against my country," Ms. Nielsen, who is 24, said in
an interview in Copenhagen with Mr. Lescaille, who is 23, sitting beside her,
"and yet I'm thrown out."

Throwing out Danes was not the intention of the new law, some of the
legislation's sponsors say, but an unavoidable result of the effort to reduce the
influx of foreigners, often from non-European countries, who, they argue, burden
the social welfare system, commit more than their share of the crime and tend
to form enclaves within Denmark, defying efforts to integrate them.

The Danish case may have produced an unusual result, but it reflects a broad
unease in many countries in Europe about the increase in non-European, often
Muslim, populations, a phenomenon that had led to the growth of several
rightist anti-immigrant parties - among them the Danish People's Party, which won 22
seats in the 179-member Danish Parliament in the elections in 2001. But only
relatively tiny Denmark, with about 450,000 foreign-born residents in a
population of 5.3 million, has actually enacted regulations that have essentially
forced some of its citizens to choose between their loved ones and their country.

"Sixty-five percent of immigrants and refugees in Denmark have never had a
job," Ivan Vesselbo, a member of Parliament from the Liberal Party who also has
a doctorate in cultural sociology, said in a telephone interview. "That's
130,000 immigrants and refugees who have never had a job, and that's a big
problem."

Mr. Vesselbo himself did research showing that even in the third generation,
98 percent of Turks living in Denmark married husbands or wives from Turkey.

"And most of them were forced or arranged marriages," Mr. Vesselbo said.

That finding and others like it led Parliament to pass a law that, among
other requirements, set a minimum age of 24 for both a husband and a wife before
they would be allowed to live as a couple in Denmark. The reasoning was that
24-year-olds would be better able to resist parental pressure to marry inside
the group than would 18- or 19-year-olds, even while giving them a chance for
more education. Among the problems the new law created, however, was that it
swept nonimmigrant Danes like Signe Nielsen, who was 22 when she married Mr.
Lescaille, who is Cuban, into its net.

In fact, the law makes it hard for foreign-Danish couples to live in Denmark
even if they are over 24. It requires a minimum income of about $50,000 a
year, along with a deposit of $10,000 until the foreign spouse is able to become a
citizen. It requires that people have their own apartments, disallowing
sublets or housing provided by parents or relatives. And, introducing what would
seem to be a subjective element, the law requires that the couple have a
stronger connection with Denmark than with any other country.

"That's difficult to prove," Mr. Vesselbo said, "and therefore it's a problem
for some people to come to Denmark."

A group that has formed to combat the effects of the legislation, Marriage
Without Borders, is made up largely of members of mixed Danish-foreign marriages
who take a certain perverse pleasure in pointing out what they see as
absurdities in the law.

"We have a case of a Danish-American couple who bought a house here, and got
jobs," said Jannick Sahlholdt, the group's vice president, "but then they were
turned down and they had to go back to the United States."

The law, its opponents contend, also has the ridiculous effect of making it
easier for foreigners from other European Union countries to come to Denmark
with foreign spouses than for some Danes to come to Denmark. A Swede, for
example, married to an Egyptian, can live freely in Denmark under the union's
requirement allowing the free movement of labor among members.

But Nanna Hvedstrup, a 24-year-old law student who is married to Leigh
Friend, a New Zealander, is living in Malmo and commuting on the train to Copenhagen
every day. She and her husband, who met three years ago in Auckland, did not
apply for Danish residency because, knowing the law, they felt they had almost
no chance of success.

For many, like Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Lescaille, the solution is to live and
work in Sweden long enough to establish Swedish residency, and then to be able to
move back to Denmark under the European Union rules. Indeed, after living in
Helsingborg for a year and a half, during which time Ms. Nielsen took the
ferry to Helsingor every day, she and Mr. Lescaille have moved to Copenhagen to
await the government's decision on a new residency application.

But while they wait Mr. Lescaille has no right to work, to benefit from
Denmark's state medical system or even to enroll in school to study Danish.

"It's difficult because I can't do anything," Mr. Lescaille said. "I just
have to wait."


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*  Madiba K. Saidy, Ph.D

*  Research Scientist, Atomic Energy of Canada

*  Department of Energy & Natural Resources Canada

*  ====

*  Secretary/Treasurer

*  Joint Division of Surface Science

*  The Chemical Institute of Canada & The Canadian Association of Physicists

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***************

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