Danes give the thumbs down to new immigration minister Søren Pind's suggestion that foreigners seeking to apply for citizenship should be assimilated and not just integrated, a Gallup/Berlingske opinion poll shows.

Poll shows majority see negative influence of multiculturalism however

In the poll, 58 percent said they agreed with Pind that the country’s culture has been negatively affected by multiculturalism. Meanwhile, some 54 percent would prefer a multicultural society to a monocultural one, and 60 percent said that foreigners should be integrated while only 29 percent said they should be assimilated.

Pind stole the headlines last week with his insistence that foreigners should assimilate into Danish society, rather than integrate.

“When people come to Denmark to become Danish citizens, they come here because they want to be Danish – and not to change Denmark,” he said.

The difference between the two terms, according to Jørgen Schack, a senior researcher at the Danish Language Council, lies in the immigrant’s degree of adaptation.

“When you assimilate, you adapt to something that already exists, while when you integrate, you're phased in as a more or less adjusted part of the whole,” he said.

source>

The Copenhagen  Post Online

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City to “include” rather than “integrate”

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