Douglas Gageby Fellowship/Migration and the reinvention of Ireland:Two European neighbours demonstrate how different thinking on migration can bring radically different results, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaicfrom Denmark and Sweden

Chileshe Rahim's alarm clock sounds at 5am. She wakes, showers, dresses herself and Fatima, and within an hour mother and child are standing on the platform at Lund station, waiting for the train to Denmark.

It brings them first to Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city, and then across the 10-mile Öresund bridge that connects the two countries across the Baltic Sea. The train passes through one of the world's longest tunnels, over the peninsula at Kastrup and finally pulls into Copenhagen central station, just in time for Chileshe to leave her daughter at the creche and make her morning lecture at the university.

In the afternoon, her college day done, she repeats the journey in reverse. And tomorrow she'll do it all again.

"I don't really have a life over here in Sweden. Even though I've been here a year, I've still been going to school in Copenhagen," she says. "I go back and forth every day. So does my husband. He doesn't know anyone here."

Chileshe was born just outside Copenhagen 21 years ago, to a Danish father and a mother from Zambia. She was raised in Denmark and lived there all her life - until last year, when she married Karim, an Algerian she met while he was studying in Copenhagen. Within weeks of their marriage, Karim received a letter to say he was about to be deported and, faced with the prospect of Chileshe having to bring up Fatima on her own, the family decided to cross the border.

Karim has set up his own business and also commutes across what is known as the "love bridge" every day.

Chileshe is one of up to 2,000 Danes with spouses from outside the EU who have been driven into involuntary exile in Sweden because of her country's immigration laws.

A report published by Dutch employment agency Randstad last month showed that the most common reason people now migrate to most European countries is not to find a job or flee persecution, but to join family members who have already settled there.

But getting a foreign spouse into Denmark is harder than anywhere else in Europe. The country's strict family reunification law requires both partners to be more than 24 years of age and to have a greater "affiliation" to Denmark than any other country. Recipients of social welfare during the previous 12 months do not qualify and couples must also prove that they are financially self-sustaining. The reunification law was one of several measures introduced following Denmark's 2001 general election, which brought a minority Conservative-Liberal coalition to power with the support of the anti-immigration Danish People's Party.

During an acrimonious campaign, immigration was projected as the most imminent and serious threat to Denmark's identity and way of life. The governing Social Democratic-led coalition, to its surprise, found itself on the defensive, in spite of having pushed through an array of policies over the previous five years which all contributed towards a tighter immigration regime. The opposition astutely capitalised on public unease.

"In an important sense, the present Danish government owes its life to the question of immigration. It depends for its continued popular backing largely on its policies and successes in this field," according to Ulf Hedetoft, professor of international studies at Aalborg University. In 2005 the coalition was returned, with the People's Party gaining two seats.

One of the first demands made by the People's Party was that about 100 government agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working for migrant groups should be disbanded or deprived of state funding. The coalition agreed, with prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen arguing that there were too many "judges of taste", too many experts telling society how it should behave.

"Today there's no voice on behalf of the ethnic minorities in Denmark. There's no one who can speak out," says Niels-Erik Hansen, a lawyer and director of the Documentation and Advisory Centre on Racial Discrimination. His organisation was included on what he calls the government's "death list", and almost overnight its annual grant of two million Danish kroner (€270,000) was withdrawn and it was forced to cut its staff from five to one.

On his office wall there is a cutting from the front page of a Danish weekly from 2005. It carries a photograph of the founder of the People's Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, under the banner: "I'm the one who decides."

Denmark now has the most stringent immigration laws in Europe. The number of residence permits issued to refugees or their relatives has been cut by a factor of four since 2001, and a report discussed widely in Denmark last week showed that, of every 100 Iraqis who claim asylum in the country, only seven are granted status. Among EU states, only Greece is less hospitable to Iraqis.

Immigrants who do make it into Denmark must wait seven years for permanent residency and nine for citizenship, and then only after they pass tests on Danish language and history.

The terms of the country's immigration debate are set by the People's Party, but its ire is directed less at immigrants as a category than at one group in particular: Muslims.

People's Party MP Morten Messerschmidt (27) rejects the anti-immigration designation and readily accepts that Europe has benefited from the free movement of labour. "I wouldn't call my party anti-immigration. I'd rather call it an anti-Islamic party if I had to say anti- anything . . . The problem is that we are facing migration from countries which are culturally, mentally, socially at a different place from Denmark and Europe."

He denies there is racism in the party's rhetoric, or that it plays to racist impulses (a Dane who converts to "Islamism" is "just as huge a problem as those many Islamists who come from the Middle East", he says). As for Islamophobia, it's "just a negative word for a realistic judgment of Islam and the consequences of Islamic civilisation which its culture has provided".

Messerschmidt suggests that by being "successful in stopping immigration", the government and the municipalities have been able to devote their resources to integrating those immigrants and their descendants who are already in the country. Fewer are unemployed than in 2001 and progress is being made in other areas too, he says.

Denmark's nativist approach is starkly at odds with that of its neighbour across the Baltic. Sweden, another relatively homogenous country that has been quickly transformed into a multi-ethnic, multicultural one, now has a foreign-born population of some 12 per cent, compared to 8.5 per cent in Denmark.

And while the Swedish government also places great stress on integration, it is generally open to migration. It has, broadly speaking, a policy of welcoming refugees, and was one of only three EU states (the others were Ireland and Britain) to open its labour market to citizens of the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004.

Sweden's political mainstream was spooked by a series of racist episodes in the 1990s, but the government acted vigorously with new laws, education programmes and tougher penalties for racist acts. Unlike Denmark, far-right parties have found little response from the electorate. And while immigration was expected to be the headline act in last year's election campaign, it barely got an airing. The Swedish Democratic Party, a far-right group, got 2.6 per cent in the last election.

Uneven settlement of newcomers has led to segregation and social problems in some parts of Sweden. But, unlike Denmark, this appears generally to be seen by the state, not as an ethnic or religious problem, but as an economic one. Whereas the Danish People's Party talks about culture and religion as obstacles to integration, the mayor of Malmö, Ilmar Reepalu, believes the first hindrance is the fact that so many immigrants languish at the bottom rung of the economic hierarchy.

His city has an exceptionally high immigrant population - about a third were born outside Sweden - and in Rosengard, an archipelago of high-rise housing projects on its fringe, there are some schools where more than 95 per cent of the pupils are foreign-born. It is also one of the poorest, most welfare-dependent parts of Sweden.

Unemployment here has taken on an ethnic dimension, says Reepalu, and he would like to see immigrants spread more evenly across the country so that his city could absorb more into the workforce.

"If we had a lack of workforce, of course it would be very easy to accept even more, but the most important way to get into a country and be a part of a country is to get a job and create your own future, not to have to lean on social welfare," he says.

The city has set up "work and study centres", where an individual plan is drawn up for every jobseeker who looks for help. "We have 7,000 people with these plans and every year about 55 per cent manage to get a job or get into study for a new job," says Reepalu.

According to Mandana Zarrehparvar of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the rise of the Danish People's Party and the embrace of its thinking by the mainstream was the inevitable outcome of a failure over 40 years to integrate and include ethnic minorities in Danish society (Denmark's first integration law was adopted in 1999).

Even when the state began to talk about integration, it was construed as a one-way process whereby the immigrant attached himself to the group by learning Danish, adapting to society's norms and so on. "In Sweden they adopted a more inclusionary strategy, thinking that the person has to come into our society, but the society has also got to change at the same time," she says.

"They started looking at their own systems, tried to see 'how are we going to integrate people?' It's not by making them into Swedes, it's by accepting them as they are, use the resources they come with, and help them where they need help."

Sweden's more relaxed regime also offers couples like Chileshe and Karim a loophole out of exile: Danes can qualify for Swedish passports after only two years' residence. And with a Swedish passport, former Danes can use EU laws to return home - with their spouses. But Chileshe's experience of being forced out of her country has left a sour taste, and she doesn't know if she'd want to return.

"Every time I see the People's Party on TV, I'm so close to tears. There are so many things they say that just aren't human . . . They are just pointing fingers and saying, 'these people', 'these people'. And I'm Danish. It's unbelievable. It just makes me want to stay away."

changingplaces@irish-times.ie

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is the winner of the 2007 Douglas Gageby Fellowship. His series runs each Wednesday.

All articles published so far are available at www.ireland.com/focus/gageby