Denmark Tallied What Every Resident Pays And Takes… Guess Which Migrants Come Out $11,000 Short

Denmark’s Finance Ministry added up the taxes paid and the public spending on each resident and sorted the results by origin: immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey cost the state a net DKK 74,000 (about $11,000) each in 2019, while immigrants from Western countries paid in DKK 52,000 (about $7,700) a head more than they drew.

The numbers, published in 2023, resurfaced overnight in a post on X calling them “brutal,” with a 76-second video whose narrator calls the claim that “the economy needs migration” “probably one of the most brazen lies ever told.”

Denmark actually did the math on mass migration, and the results are brutal

Their Ministry of Finance counted every tax paid and every public expense for every resident, broken down by where they came from and how old they are

Immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa,… pic.twitter.com/4hY7XgbsWn

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) November 11, 2026

The narrator then scales the Danish per-head figure up to other countries, arriving at “€35 billion a year” for Germany, “€28 billion” for France and “at least €120 billion a year” for the EU, on the reasoning that “infrastructure, education and health care are fairly similar, so the costs probably are too.”

The ministry’s analysis of immigrants’ net contribution to public finances in 2019 came out in May 2023 and was reissued that September, after Finance Minister Nicolai Wammen acknowledged an error in its country grouping that had left Iran out of the MENAPT category. In the corrected edition, which Wammen cited to parliament that November, the MENAPT per-head net cost is about DKK 74,000, down from DKK 79,000 in the first.

People of Danish origin contributed a net DKK 22,000 each in the first edition, while Danish-born children of MENAPT immigrants ran deeper in the red than their parents, at a net cost of DKK 109,000 (about $16,200) each. Wammen told lawmakers the group averages “may reflect differences in the groups’ composition, including age composition” (translated).

The Immigration Ministry told parliament in December 2024 that MENAPT immigrants and their descendants together were a net cost of DKK 24 billion (about $3.6 billion) in 2019, while those from Western countries put in a net DKK 11 billion. All immigrants and descendants together came to a net cost of DKK 16 billion.

The ministry’s breakdown by how people first came shows immigrants admitted to work were a net plus of DKK 14 billion, while those who came for asylum cost DKK 6 billion and family-reunification arrivals DKK 4 billion. For MENAPT immigrants, work arrivals came out even, and those who came for asylum, for family reunification or before 1997 were each about DKK 4 billion in the red.

The post says the MENAPT group is a net cost “at EVERY age of their life.” The ministry’s 2018 edition found that MENAPT immigrants aged 25 to 64 averaged a net cost of DKK 57,000 each in 2018, against net contributions of DKK 133,000 for Danes and DKK 91,000 for Western immigrants the same age, and only 35% of them paid in more than they took out.

A 2018 ministry projection found non-Western immigrants a net cost “across nearly all age groups” (translated), while Western immigrants and their descendants contribute “roughly on par” (translated) with Danes at each age. Over a lifetime it put non-Western immigrants at a net cost of about DKK 35,000 for every year of life and Western immigrants at a net gain of about DKK 31,000, and it put the long-run cost of non-Western immigrants and their descendants at about DKK 33 billion a year.

According to the 2018 edition, MENAPT immigrants’ per-head net cost had been shrinking, from DKK 124,000 in 2015 to DKK 85,000 in 2018, in 2018 prices. As recently as October 2025, Wammen was still citing the 2019 figures to parliament, putting non-Western immigrants and descendants at a net cost of about DKK 27 billion that year.

Immigration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek put one group’s bill in plainer terms in July 2025, during Denmark’s EU presidency: for the 40,000 Syrian refugees in Denmark “there is a total income of about half a billion euros,” he said, while “the associated public expenditure amounts to about one and a half billion.”

A government bill sent out for consultation in June orders municipalities to re-examine about 5,000 early-retirement pensions targeting early pensioners under 60 in certain social-housing areas who first arrived from outside the EU and EEA, from Dec. 1 through the end of 2027. It docks DKK 1,000 from the pension of anyone who skips an interview without good reason and lets municipalities pull criminal records without consent.

Nationally, 19.1% of non-Western immigrants aged 40 to 64 are on early retirement, against 9.4% of people of Danish origin, and in Odense and Aarhus the share is about 30%, according to figures for 2025 from the think tank CEPOS.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s government moved in January to ramp up deportations of criminal foreigners. She resigned after her Social Democrats’ heavy losses in the March election, then returned for a third term in June.

Denmark had 187,867 immigrants from MENAPT countries as of July 1, 2025, up about 13,000 since mid-2019, according to the Immigration Ministry, after rising by nearly 25,000 in the four years before that.