Hello Denmark

When arriving in Denmark as a newly arrived person, the first thing one might notice, is minimalist design, and people, who appreciate personal space and discreet behaviour in public. One of the main issues, as many newly arrived people have experiences, is how difficult it is to make social connections with scandinavians. Scandinavia is a trust based society, and this also goes for Denmark. Upon deeper inspection, this means that although Danish culture is based on trust. This means, in general, that trust is passed on from parents

to children through early life socialization (Uslaner, 2002; 2008). The trust is therefore not based on experiential alteration. This means that the cultural perspective of Danes, generally are highly stable throughout life and over generations. Svendsen & Svendsen (2004) argue that the Danish co-operative movement, which arose among peasants in the late 19th century, was built on a micro-foundation of trust and social capital among neighboring farmers, and that the movement further expanded the stock of society-level social capital, which in turn strongly influenced the later political and institutional development in Denmark with positive consequences for social trust.

In Denmark, the unemployment rate for immigrants is almost 6% higher than for nationals, and many first-generation immigrants find it difficult to integrate into the Danish economy.

One possible explanation for this can very well be discrimination. But the most prevalent is the barriers to assimilation set up in the Danish system. But the most prevalent is the lack of unskilled jobs, and ideas of what “qualified” for the job means. When there is a lack of language skills, the employee will be difficult to train, and communication becomes nearly impossible. Denmark’s extensive training programs have attracted attention all over the world as part of the “Flexicurity” model. Flexicurity means that both labour laws and collective bargaining agreements make it easy to fire workers, fired workers can rely on generous unemployment benefits and government retraining programs, and due to it being easy to fire workers, employers are not hesitant to employ new workers when the business needs to expand, with out feering to be “stuck” with an expensive employee and no work.