In Berlingske, Gurpaul Singh Rehal writes a chronicle about his 80-year-old father, who came from Punjab to Denmark as a guest worker in the 1970s.

The message is that Danish business life was carried by men such as his father, and that no one thanks them.

It is a good story. But it is not the whole story.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Danish industry brought in thousands of workers from Turkey, Yugoslavia and Pakistan. They filled genuine gaps in the labour market and paid taxes. The idea was that they would return home again. They did not. They had children who began school, and the planned return journey never materialised.

When the oil crisis came in 1973, unemployment hit them hard. Many ended up on passive benefits. The Ministry of Finance, the Rockwool Foundation and the Danish DREAM model show the same thing:

Non-Western immigrants and their descendants have a negative net contribution to the public finances, in the order of tens of billions of kroner per year.

The taxpayers received the bill.

Norway followed along the same path

Here at home, the story is almost identical. The first Pakistanis came to Norway at the end of the 1960s. When Denmark introduced an immigration stop in 1970, many turned towards Norway. By 1970, Pakistanis were already by far the largest foreign worker group in the country. Norway introduced its own immigration stop on 1 February 1975. But the halt applied only to work permits. Family reunification was not affected. While the number of male labour immigrants declined, the number of women and children increased correspondingly.

Nor here either did the calculations add up. Statistics Norway (SSB) has calculated that each non-Western immigrant costs the state a net 4.1 million kroner over the course of a lifetime. The total future costs are estimated at 1,200 billion kroner. As of January 2026, 54,195 immigrants were receiving disability benefits in Norway, an increase of 80 per cent over ten years. 79 per cent of all social assistance goes to non-Western immigrants.

The columnist in Berlingske wants us to remember a generation that struggled and contributed. That is not unreasonable. But telling half the story is not honesty.

It is bitter nostalgia that unfortunately led to more expenditure than income.