The welfare state

A few weeks ago, I asked my classmate Maike why she came to Denmark and plans to stay here. She said that despite the high taxes and cost of living, she thinks that there is a better future here than in her native Germany where there is high unemployment and graduates go from one unpaid internship to another but don't get hired.

There are pluses to living here. Healthcare and education are free. If you're Danish, you can study at university for nothing. But the system is never perfect. There are complaints about good medical treatment and facilities. Eventually, education might have to be paid for.

The Philippines cannot adopt a system like this simply because of the money it needs to finance such a set-up. Can you imagine all hospitals working like PGH? It would be crazy. It's hard enough to get most people to pay their taxes, even harder to get the taxes to work for the people instead of lining some guy's pockets.

I talked to one of the pioneer Filipinos here, a pensioner who came to DK 39 years ago and now shuttles back and forth from Pinas. According to him, the Pinay au pairs cannot get professional work here and can only stay for the duration of their contract (which explains why most of them are young). Life in Denmark is not as easy as it used to be, but there are plenty of jobs, he said. He encouraged me to keep studying. I said that I will, but I have no plans of staying here.

Immigration is a different issue. It's still very much a homogenous society, but that is slowly changing. I don't know how effective the law that prohibits Danes from marrying a foreigner below 24 years old is. There was a girl at the embassy in Manila who was saying that she just turned 24 and she can now go and marry her old Dane. But then that also happens elsewhere in the world, except that in this case it's interracial and somehow it looks suspect.

Many Filipinos would probably think the same way as Maike. Denmark might hold the kind of future they only dream of. But if you look at the 10,000-strong Filipino community here, most of whom are working just to send money back home, maybe they would still rather live where their families are.

(Took this photo in Roskilde weeks ago. We now get two-digit temps in the middle of the day. Yesterday I could walk outside in a jumper, no coat necessary.)