{"id":15219,"date":"2026-04-06T13:58:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/?p=15219"},"modified":"2026-04-06T14:21:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T13:21:16","slug":"who-is-gaining-danish-citizenship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/2026\/04\/who-is-gaining-danish-citizenship\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is gaining Danish citizenship?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Danish constitution says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00a744
\n(1) No alien shall be naturalized except by
\nstatute.
\n(2) The extent of the right of aliens to become
\nowners of real property shall be laid down by
\nstatute<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So there are two ways to be a Danish citizen. You are either granted it by virtue of birth to a Danish citizen, or parliament specifically makes a law to grant it to you. Since all laws are public, everybody who has been ‘naturalized’ this way has their name written in a law somewhere. This fact means that we can track all such conversions for the purpose of seeing who is ‘becoming Danish’ in this legal sense. Using Claude, I scraped all these laws and built a database. It turns out that the information available about the people also changes by year:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For the pre-2000 laws, the text stated their birth country. Here’s a snippet from a 1995 law<\/a>:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0Samir Toufik Abbas,<\/i>\u00a0K\u00f8benhavn, f\u00f8dt i Libanon.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0Abdel Haq Abdel Razzag Abbas-Al-Awsi,<\/i>\u00a0Frederiksberg, f\u00f8dt i Irak.<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0Farah-Legha Abdalkhani,<\/i>\u00a0Odense, f\u00f8dt i Iran.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“f\u00f8dt i” = born in. For the 2000-2020 laws, no information is given, 2010 example<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

1)<\/span>\u00a0Manuelito Sy Abalos,\u00a0<\/span>Albertslund.<\/p>\n

2)<\/span>\u00a0Gulalay Abbassi,\u00a0<\/span>\u00c5rhus.<\/p>\n

3)<\/span>\u00a0Farrokh Abdolkarimi Koohbanani,\u00a0<\/span>Aalborg.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Only their current residence commune is given. From 2021 to present, broader regions are given:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a7 2.<\/span>\u00a0Indf\u00f8dsret meddeles til f\u00f8lgende personer, som er statsborgere i andre vestlige lande end lande i Norden:<\/p>\n

2)<\/span>\u00a0Maiken Ellen Baird,<\/span>\u00a0bosiddende i Amerikas Forenede Stater.<\/p>\n

3)<\/span>\u00a0Bente Beckmann,<\/span>\u00a0bosiddende i Forbundsrepublikken Tyskland.<\/p>\n

4)<\/span>\u00a0Ian-Alexandru Aakmann Businschi,<\/span>\u00a0bosiddende i Silkeborg Kommune.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But these concern now citizenship not birth country. As such, we have no data aside from names 2000-2020 and citizenship for 2021-present. In total, there are ~31k people with complete information which we can train on. There are laws before 2000 but they follow a different database format, are harder to get, and won’t have many people.<\/p>\n

Before going further, it is reasonable to look at the counts of names. First names:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a variety of versions of Mohammad, and it is in fact the most common naturalized name. Merging the spelling variants:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The last names are less conspicuously foreign:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are a lot of Danish ones, which presumably reflect foreign spouses taking a Danish name and eventually acquiring citizenship. The most common is the Vietnamese Nguyen.<\/p>\n

Using the names of people, we can attempt to infer their ethnicity for the years we have no birth country data. There are a variety of such name-to-ethnicity prediction models available. A commonly used one is ethnicolr<\/a>. It produces these results:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a surprising number of Nordic and British names. However, checking these we see that they are often wrong:<\/p>\n