Denmark’s uprooting of settled residents from ‘ghettos’ forms part of aggressive plan to assimilate nonwhite inhabitants

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Selma Hedlund, Boston University

(THE CONVERSATION) History is full of examples of governments using forced segregation against ethnic minorities.

From settler colonialists coercing Indigenous peoples into reservations, Nazis forcing Jews into ghettos or the United States segregating Black Americans through redlining and zoning policies, displacement and housing have long been at the heart of institutional racism.

But in today’s Europe, an inverted trend of coercive assimilation is emerging in northern nations grappling with high levels of immigration. As a part of what has been described as both “ethnic engineering” and among the “harshest immigration policies” in the world, Denmark is forcibly uprooting people from neighborhoods they call “ghettos” and redirecting them to alternative housing.

In neighboring Sweden,...