Denmark’s immigrant population has increased only slightly since the wave of refugees and migrants came up into Europe in 2015. Yet in certain quarters, the number appears to be rising at an alarming rate. In an op-ed column in Jyllands-Posten entitled “Everyday jihad is a result of the increasing demographic replacement” (DK), Pia Kjærsgaard, the founder of the Danish People’s Party, wrote that Denmark’s survival as a homogeneous nation was being threatened. The reason for her concern was that she read that the non-Western population in the country was some 400,000 larger than the official figure from Statistics Denmark.

In Information, another Danish daily, Serge Savin looked into the figures (DK) and found the situation different than Kjærsgaard implied in more than one way. The figure that Kjærsgaard referred to  derives from a book, Integration – her går det godt (Integration: It’s going well here), by Hjarn von Zernichow Borberg, external associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Economic Institute. Statistics Denmark had registered 800,000 immigrants and their descendants, and von Zernichow Borberg first listed 1.2 million and then revised it down to 1.1 million.

Fun with math
So the difference in the two figures is really 300,000 and not 400,000. The reason for the difference, von Zernichow Borberg explains, is that Statistics Denmark counts only children with two foreign parents and he added children with a single foreign parent. But those parents are not all from non-Western countries; they are foreigners from the entire world. He estimates that around 100,000 are from non-Western countries. Furthermore, von Zernichow Borberg continues, Kjærsgaard implies that the threat to Danish culture comes from increasing Muslim influence, and not all of these parents from non-Western countries are from predominately Muslim countries. They may be from China or Ukraine. The estimate of additional children with a parent from a Muslim country is 25,000. Here are current figures from Statistics Denmark.

The more accurate figure for the additional, at least partially Muslim population above the official figure is thus around one-sixteenth of the number that Kjærsgaard cites. As Savin notes, the demographic replacement theory has a long racist history. It got a strong boost from Renaud Camus’s Le grand remplacement in 2012 and figured in various right-wing extremist and white supremacist terrorist actions such as those in Utoya and Christchurch. In the US, it burst into prominence in the chant, “The Jews will not replace us,” in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Kjærsgaard did not wish to comment on the Information article, but another member of the Danish People’s Party, Martin Henriksen, found no reason to avoid the term “replacement” because it was “the best way to get the message out.”

Concept creep: The better it gets, the worse it seems
The surprising thing about such alarmism coming at this moment is that integration seems to be working in Denmark much better than it had before. And that is owing to some degree to the many restrictive measures that the preceding center-right administration implemented, partly at the urging of the Danish People’s Party. The country suspended participation in the UN quota refugee system and discouraged migrants. The new Social Democratic administration thus far has softened those restrictions only slightly. It is coming under some pressure from its supporting left-wing parties to do more, though, and perhaps that is what Kjærsgaard and her allies want to discourage. The further irony, noted by von Zernichow Borberg, is that the additional number of children should be viewed as a positive sign. Muslim immigrants have been criticized for maintaining a separate, “parallel society,” and intermarriage is clearly a step toward integration.