By demonising asylum seekers, Denmark reflects a panic in social democracy | Kenan Malik

Forcing Syrians to return home shows the left apeing the far right in a race to the bottom

What do you call a government so hostile to refugees that it wants to send them back to a country that tortures and disappears" its critics on a mass scale? Reactionary? Monstrous? In Denmark, they call it social democratic.

Denmark is the first European nation to insist that Syrian refugees should return to their home country because Bashar al-Assad's regime is now in control and there is little conflict. It has revoked the residency permits of dozens of Syrian refugees and started detaining those it wants to deport. Yet it cannot actually deport anyone because it has severed diplomatic relations with Damascus. Assad's regime is, apparently, despotic enough for Copenhagen to abjure relations but not so bad that Syria is unsafe for returning refugees.