Immigrants take language protest to the streets of Denmark

Copenhagen Post:

The square in front of Denmark's parliamentary buildings was filled with several hundred protesters yesterday, as they demonstrated against the government's increased requirements for immigrants and refugees seeking citizenship.

The regulations, which were instituted last week, require applicants for Danish citizenship to pass a culture and language test, which the demonstrators said rendered all the language tests immigrants had already been forced to take useless.

Foreign students from language schools in and around the capital organised the demonstration.

Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen of opposition party the Social Liberals was among the speakers who criticised the Liberal-Conservative government's requirements that immigrants needed to pass an advanced language test to attain citizenship.

'The level of the test is the equivalent of a university education,' said Nielsen.

Concerns were also raised by Bashir Farah, the spokesman for the student council of a language school for immigrants learning Danish.

'It affects the weak and those that don't have an education. That affects 75 percent of immigrants and refugees,' he said.

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