From Integration to Deportation

Abstract

Abstract Following the so-called “paradigm shift” in Danish refugee policy in 2019, the previous ambition of “integration” was replaced by a state strategy of revocation and deportation. This article suggests that the political change reflects the development of a particular “grammar of identity,” where refugees are viewed as exogenous “others” who are neither seen nor recognized as part of the Danish nation and welfare state. The grammar tends to cast externalization as a reasonable and necessary solution to current challenges—best illustrated by the utopic–dystopic vision of sending asylum-seekers off to camps in Rwanda. Finally, the article discusses the risk of the current grammar transmuting into an “anti-grammar” of ethnic annihilation by means of externalization and deportation.