The Danish State and Migrants

Educational policies directed towards people with a migration history and their children overlap, and they can to some extent be seen as related to other areas of policy, such as social and labour policy—for instance, what was in the 1970s labelled ‘foreign worker policy’.

The welfare state historian Heidi Vad Jonsson (2013, 27) has looked at what was from the 1990s in Denmark called ‘integration policy’ but was previously known as ‘guest worker policy’, ‘foreign worker policy’, and ‘immigration policy’. She points to the fact that these conceptualisations all cover varieties of welfare policies targeting new citizens in the shape of guest workers, immigrants, refugees, etc., including the new generations. Although the target group—the individuals who have been the subject of the policies—has changed, as has the concrete strategies within the policies, the welfare policies are all directed towards foreigners—people who were conceived of and defined as foreigners.

The 1970 ministerial circular concerning ‘foreign children’ mentioned in the opening of this chapter should thus also be seen in relation to the other types of such policies. The circular itself made the children of labour migrants for the first time subject to compulsory education and thus possible pupils of the Folkeskole (directly translated: the people’s school), comprehensive primary, and lower secondary school.3 Less than a month before, another significant policy document had been issued, namely a notice (Meddelelse) from the Labour Ministry later known as the first or small ‘immigration stop’, which resulted in no new first-time work permits being issued to foreign workers. A later circular specified that a work permit should be applied for prior to arrival in Denmark and that such permits were now attached to a specific employer and dependent on whether that employer could prove that it was impossible to find suitable labour already residing legally in the country, including foreign workers with a valid residence permit.4 Since opportunities for dispensation were numerous, it did not in fact mean a halt to migration, nor did the second, more expanded immigration restriction in 1973, which limited dispensation options significantly (Press Notice Ministry of Labour, in Fürstnow-Sorensen 1974, 2–3.

Immigration into Denmark was not an entirely new phenomenon. During the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, for instance, Polish and German rural workers and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had arrived in Denmark. In the interwar period, groups of children from hunger-plagued Vienna were received in Danish foster homes for shorter or longer periods, and accounts from some of these children tell about them being placed in Danish school classes after having learned to speak Danish in the foster homes (Zip Sane 1997, 99). Similarly, over 70,000 Finnish children were sent to foster homes in other Nordic countries between 1939 and 1945, including Denmark, where about a fifth of these children ended up actually staying in the country after being adopted (Zip Sane 1997, 107). During the 1950s and 1960s, refugees from Eastern Europe arrived in Denmark, as did refugees from Latin America from the late 1960s onwards.5

In the 1960s, workers from Turkey and Yugoslavia were recruited into Danish industry due to a labour shortage, something that started to be an issue of debate by the close of the decade. In a 1967 theme issue of Kontakt—the organ of the civil society organisation Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (directly translated ‘Interaction between Peoples’, although its official English name is ‘ActionAid Denmark’)—about foreign workers, families and children were not focused on, and in a similar theme issue in 1970/71, the question of immigrant families was marginal and primarily hypothetical; it was considered an issue that might arise in the future (Skovmand 1967, 1970/71).

From the beginning of the 1970s, this was about to change. The Danish public and the Danish state—the school system and its actors in particular—discovered that a new group had started to attend school. As seems to have been the case with the Viennese children, these children were from the outset placed in regular Danish-language school classes. The institutional shock that many of the often quite newly arrived children not could actually follow the Danish-language instruction became the impulse for initiating special strategies and forms of organisation—for instance, the so-called reception classes (modtagelsesklasser) that were introduced by Copenhagen Municipality in 1972. Especially at the municipal level and among the teachers who taught these classes, specific pedagogical strategies started to develop. This included publications with the new group of pupils as a specific pedagogical object. Although differences in language were the most obvious challenge from the outset, culture in the form of ‘cultural differences’ and ‘cultural background’ also soon became part of what was seen as a problem as well as a parameter of explanation for the problems that were generally detected concerning the group. These issues included the poverty and illiteracy (or limited writing and reading skills) of the parents, a lack of discipline, and the failure of instruction to use the experience of the pupils as its point of departure. These were all features that were at the time problematised in schooling in general, but in the case of the children with a migration history, the cultural background of the child was to various degrees assumed to be the cause of the problems. Since the parents represented this background, the foreign worker family soon became the object of this knowledge production, too.