Sixty-seven of the 321 refugees received prison sentences, while a majority relied on public welfare
In 1992, the Danish Parliament passed a special law granting asylum to 321 Palestinian refugees from Lebanon who were living in the country illegally. Twenty-five years later, a Danish minister, Martin Henriksen, asked a parliamentary committee to examine how they had fared in their new home.
As controversy erupts over the State Department’s decision to temporarily suspend visas for Gazans visiting the United States, an instructive report produced by that parliamentary committee has been making the rounds on social media.
The committee’s report cast doubt on the wisdom of the decision to take in those refugees, noting that 67 of the 321 had received prison sentences of some kind, while 137 were subject to legal fines larger than $200. That is, more than 60 percent carried criminal records.
Welfare dependency was also widespread. A majority of the refugees received welfare benefits, according to the report, which tracked those benefits from 2007 to 2016. No fewer than 180 of the refugees, or 56 percent, received welfare benefits during the 10-year span. That figure peaked at 189 in 2016.
“There is no doubt that in Denmark we have previously been too careless with who has been granted permanent residence permits,” Denmark’s then-acting minister for immigration and integration, Kaare Dybvad Bek, said in response to the report in 2020. “Some of those who have come here are not integrated, and these figures also bear witness to that. It is depressing when such a large part of a certain group has been convicted of crime or is on public welfare.”
Denmark passed an integration law in 1999, seven years after it granted residency to the Palestinian refugees. It mandated a three-year introduction program for refugees that includes language lessons.
Debate over Palestinian refugees has heated up in the United States amid Israel’s retaliatory war on Hamas.
When the State Department announced its decision last week to suspend visitor visas for Gazans, it cited reports from several congressional offices indicating the organizations facilitating their evacuation from the strip have ties to terrorist groups.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the visa pause on Sunday.
“Some of the organizations bragging about and involved in acquiring these visas have strong links to terrorist groups like Hamas,” he said, noting the pause will allow the administration to “reevaluate how those visas are being vetted and what relationship, if any, has there been by these organizations to the process of acquiring those visas.”
