Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland have all agreed to cooperate in deporting illegal immigrants by pooling together their deportees on shared flights back to their homelands in cooperation with the European Union border agency Frontex.
Danish Minister for Immigration and Integration Kaare Dybvad Bek commented on the new agreement saying that it is “a crucial principle that foreigners without legal residence return home,” the Danish online tabloid Avisen Danmark reports.
“We must avoid that they travel across our countries and go under the radar of the authorities. Therefore, after a good meeting in Copenhagen, we have decided to strengthen cooperation,” he added.
The agreement came after a two-day meeting between the Nordic countries that saw them agree to three points aimed at facilitating more successful deportations.
The first is support for reintegrating illegal migrants back into the society of their home countries and strengthening cooperation with those home countries, while the second is to organise joint flights with Frontex. While Norway and Iceland are not European Union member states, they are part of the Schengen Area.
The ministers representing the Nordic countries also agreed as a third measure to do more to offer voluntary repatriation programmes to migrants along with resettlement assistance.
Danish Minister Dybvad Bek also stated that the ministers agreed to a joint aid programme aimed at illegal migrants currently in North African states and that they would be given resettlement assistance to return to their origin countries.
Denmark’s Social Democratic government has led the way in Europe in terms of reducing the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country and opening up new paths for deportation, being the first country to start deporting migrants back to Syria.
In January 2021, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen set a target of zero new asylum seekers after arguing that too many migrants arriving in the country could affect social cohesion.
“We cannot promise zero asylum seekers, but we can set out the vision that we also did before the elections, namely that we want a new asylum system and then we do what we can to introduce it,” she told the Danish parliament, the Folketing.
“One in five young men from non-Western backgrounds who were born in 1997 had breached the penal code before the age of 21. One in five,” Frederiksen said, noting the high rates of crime among immigrants in Denmark.
“It’s nothing new, and that’s the problem: it’s been going on for too many years. Girls are called derogatory things because they are Danish. Or girls are subjected to social control because they have become too Danish. A sausage cart in Brønshøj is attacked with firecrackers because it sells pork,” she said.
Sweden, historically, has been on the opposite of the spectrum regarding illegal migrants and has struggled with deportations in recent years due to a variety of factors but the centre-right government under Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has promised to increase deportations, particularly of criminal migrants.
Following the murder of two Swedish nationals last month in Brussels by an Islamic terrorist, Prime Minister Kristersson called for the European Union to increase security on its external borders and do more to facilitate the deportation of dangerous individuals.
“These terrorists want to frighten us into obedience and silence. That will not happen. This is a time for more security. We can’t be naive,” he said.
Sweden has also seen a surge of gang-related violence this year, much of which is linked to immigrant gangs, with the leader of one of the gangs, known as the Kurdish Fox, currently hiding in Turkey, where the government there has refused to extradite him despite Swedish requests.
A report from 2020 revealed that the majority of violent gang leaders in Sweden’s capital Stockholm were born overseas, while the remaining leaders were born in Sweden but were from migration backgrounds.
Last year, National Police Chief Anders Thornberg admitted the connection between gang crime and mass migration saying the problem of shootings and bombings among gangs was “based on a number of different factors. A sharp increase in demand for drugs, accelerating technological development and digitalisation, increased migration and lack of integration.”
