The real point being, be choosy on who you let in, and be confident of who you are and what your values stand for.
“If you can’t formulate what you stand for, it is hard to tell others about it. It needs to be worked on and every once in a while you need to put your foot down with somebody and say ‘Hey! That won’t do’,” she says in the new book, ‘De Dybeste Rødder’ (‘The Deepest Roots’).
Denmark’s queen: Living here doesn’t make you Danish
Published: 24 Oct 2016 13:59 GMT+02:00
- Denmark is alienating its needed foreign workers (14 Oct 16)
- Queen Margrethe: Denmark ‘not a multicultural country’ (04 Oct 16)
“It’s not a law of nature that one becomes Danish by living in Denmark. It doesn’t necessarily happen,” Queen Margrethe says.
The queen goes on to say that certain groups of people are better at integrating than others.
“Those who came from Southeast Asia have generally prospered. Others have had more difficulty adapting. They have had a hard time finding their rhythm in Denmark,” she says.
Queen Margrethe also says that Danes have been naive in thinking that integration wouldn’t take hard work on both sides.
“We thought that these things would take care of themselves. That if you walked through the streets of Copenhagen and drank the municipal water and rode the municipal bus, you’d soon become a Dane. It was so obvious to us, and therefore we thought that it must also be obvious for those who settled and lived here. It wasn’t,” the queen says.