Invisible internationals

The International
6 days ago
3 min read

Denmark’s data blind spot.

Photograph: Pexels

Denmark's data systems track almost everything but lack detailed information about its international residents. We reveal how bureaucratic blind spots shape priorities.

Who gets counted and who doesn't

Denmark has a vast open database of what goes on here, run by DST. Crime statistics, the economy, demographics - if you can count it, you can find out about it. Residence permit types define the internationals who live in Denmark, but there is a major data gap that has caused much frustration in my life.

If an immigrant from the EU has dependents, they have ‘EU family’ residence permits, whether they are partners or children. In some statistics, they are counted as ‘other EU’, lumping them in with other groups. You cannot tell who is here with a worker and who is here with a student. If the immigrant comes from outside the EU, the family members all get the same permit, which is why 1500 pre-schoolers in Denmark were granted non-EU work permits last year (Source: VAN66KA from DST).

This means it is impossible to say with confidence how many accompanying partners there even are in Denmark. Their numbers are too jumbled up. Similarly, it is impossible to look up how many internationals are here because they married a local, since they might be here under work, family reunification or study permits. Organisations must pay for custom analysis to get anywhere near the question of accompanying partners, and even these are flawed as they do not always count same-sex relationships.

Employment patterns tell a story

Having populations invisible in the statistics means that policy makers have no idea they exist. If you don't know any foreigners, you might not know about the issue that has plagued the international community for decades: the struggle to get a job from inside the country.

The Jobindsats website, run by the government work department (STAR), disambiguates workers who are the 'primary' permit holder from family members, for all permit types. DST does not. Cross-referencing STAR and DST data, then crunching it together, leads me to this astonishing graph for EU adults (Fig. 1).

Do you see it? It looks like nearly 40,000 adult dependents are unemployed. I have estimated this number before, using a different method. I would love to estimate how many non-EU accompanying partners are in the same position, and even though STAR knows how many of these partners are working, DST does not have it broken down like that.

Let me try to show it another way. This is how employment breaks down by age and sex for every Danish immigrant (Fig. 2).

Foreign women are much more likely to work part-time compared to foreign men, where it is basically unheard of from their 30s. Women are also significantly more likely to be unemployed: they have a 33% unemployment rate compared to 24% for men.

The cost of invisibility

The invisibility of their circumstances allows for a lot of imaginative storytelling. In the absence of hard facts, people can hand-wave it away: "They choose not to work full time because of their culture or their lifestyle". For decades, this has been the narrative.

Now, a recent custom analysis by Copenhagen kommune showed that if the partner cannot get a job in the first year, the chances the family will stay five years decreases by ten percentage points. This has inspired the momentum to help them. The new interest in the plight of international accompanying partners is, of course, welcome. But many groups also struggle to find work who remain unheard: partners of locals, recent international graduates, repats and so on. They are invisible in the data and so suffer in silence.

Employment break down by age and sex for every Danish immigrant (Fig. 2).

Policy failure

Denmark prides itself on having the world's best administrative data. Yet tens of thousands of international residents remain statistically invisible. The system that tracks almost everything is somehow unable to track these people.

Where there is a vacuum of evidence, storytelling floods in. "Ok, there are accompanying partners who cannot find jobs, but that's because they all come from professions that are not needed. Or their CV is formatted wrong. Or they just like being stay-at-home parents," and it is not for me to comment on whether any of those narratives are pure fantasy or 100% correct. We do not know. We could know! We do not have to guess.

Meanwhile, groups that no one wants to notice continue to be completely invisible to journalists, politicians, and industry. This invisibility is a policy failure that affects real lives. Until we can see all these populations clearly, how can we help them?