Banning Burkas won't stop the infidels, but it's a start.
One of Inger Stojberg’s most popular ideas is for migrants who have lived in Denmark for more than three years to pay for translators’ services when visiting a doctor, rather than relying on the State.
She says: ‘Unless we dare to make demands on foreigners, we will fail to address the serious problems of parallel societies where people neither work nor speak the language and don’t have Danish values.
‘A good place to start is to give back responsibility to those who have come here: learn the language or pay for your interpreter.’
In a poll by the newspaper B.T., 93 per cent of Danes questioned agreed with the minister’s plan.
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‘People are afraid of the consequences,’ said Annette Bjerregaard, 54, who works at the church. ‘If they feel people are integrating, they are positive. If not, they are not so positive.’
Annette’s son went to what was known among local Danes as ‘the white school’, where all the pupils were ethnic Danes. In this part of town there are neat privately owned homes, shops and pavement cafes.
Yet a mile away in a poorer part of Hvidovre it is very different. Here 5,000 people, both foreigners and Danes, live together in a sprawling council-run housing estate.
Larry Ellis, a debonair 65-year-old resident with a shock of white hair, works as a gardener at the local university. Having finished his shift, he is relaxing with friends outside the estate’s community centre.
They all agree there are too many migrants coming to Denmark. ‘That is the problem and it has not been addressed for years,’ he says.
‘Even here, we are housed in different parts of the estate to the migrants. The council has put ethnic Danes in blocks on one side of the road and Muslims in blocks on the other. We just don’t mix, and religion is part of it.’
This does not bode well for the Government’s efforts to encourage integration. And indeed, some Danes want to crack down against migrants still harder.
As the mainstream politicians react to a growing sense of disillusion about mass migration, a new party led by a 42-year-old architect called Pernille Vermund has seized the moment.
The divorced mother of three, who lives far from the Copenhagen ghettos, hopes her party — the New Right — will gain seats in elections next year on a hardline anti-migrant manifesto.
It calls for the residence permit of any ‘foreigner convicted in court’ to be withdrawn and for no more welfare benefits, housing subsidies and other state payments to anyone except Danish citizens.
She told me: ‘Politicians for decades have let people into our country who do not share our values. They do not assimilate. Now the politicians make a patchwork of rules to try to correct their own mistakes. Forcing Muslim mothers to deliver their toddlers into state-run daycare is not going to make them Danish, or less Muslim. It simply will not work.’
Her views would have been condemned as xenophobic extremism in liberal Denmark a few years ago. But mass immigration has hardened attitudes.
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Back in Mjolnerparken, where 1,752 people of 38 nationalities live cheek by jowl, I meet one of the community elders.
An Iraqi Kurd by birth, smartly dressed Taher Mustafah, 59, came to Denmark in 1985. He has worked for years as a civil servant and helped run an Islamic charity.
We stand on a busy street corner to chat, as Danish girls in skimpy shorts cycle past women with veiled faces shepherding children along pavements, closely watched over by their husbands. Truly, it is a stark clash of cultures.
Taher looks at one of the veiled women and shakes his head.
‘I know her,’ he says. ‘She is Tunisian and her husband is an Iraqi. My view is that if you live in a country, you should show respect for the society in which you live. She should not wear the burka here in Denmark and soon she will not be allowed to.’
Yet nearby, in an Iraqi-owned cafe, I hear a different opinion from an Iraqi migrant father called Jaber Saleh, 40, who is eating a pitta bread-and-hummus lunch with his wife Farah, 29, and son Hassan, six.
The Salehs are angry with the Danish Government. Despite living and working here as a truck driver for 17 years, Jaber has still not been granted citizenship.
Since the day he arrived, he has clung to his roots. He sent his son to an Arabic school in Copenhagen until it was closed by the Government, which accused some staff of having links to terrorism.
‘The Government was wrong,’ says Jaber. ‘It was a good school where Hassan was taught in the Arabic language, not Danish, and he learnt the Koran. He speaks Arabic at home and has no Danish friends, and I am pleased about that. I don’t want him to learn from them bad things, the swearing, the low moral code of Denmark.
‘This society is too lax. I will do anything to avoid my son learning the values of Denmark.’
As I help Hassan write his name in the English alphabet in my notebook, I wonder what life will bring for this bright, well-behaved child, growing up torn between two cultures.
His family are not preparing him for life as a Dane and, in a rapidly changing country, he may never be accepted as one even if he wishes to be.
And that surely spells trouble for him and his adopted nation.
"Adopted nation"? It seems not.
