Psalm12 skrev:Yes, I'm with you on that point. But based on the way applicants under the EU rules are currently being treated, and based on, as you mentioned, Søren Pind's proposals, it didn't look like they would consider it an obstacle that it was illegal.
I think the difference is, that it would be to obvious. A government or civil cervants, who knowingly bend or break international conventions, like to be able to claim, that they thought they didnt. They like to have, what we in danish call a "figenblad", they can cover themselfes with. And in the case of the immigration test, that "figenblad" were two things:
1) That Holland had done something similar for about 5 years already (but their test is much easier than the one, it was planned to introduce in Denmark)
2) That the criteria "membership of OECD" can at least be claimed to have some degree of objectivity about it, which is not related to race, religion etc.
Presumably the latter is also why, they did not dare to except citizens from e.g. south america and the far east, even though they would probably have liked to do so. If only citizens from african or middle east countries had to past the test, it would be really difficuelt to claim, that the purpose of the test was something else than discrimination based on religion and/or ethnic origin, which of course it actually was.
Søren Pind also argued, that the exemption was not illegal discrimination, because nobody would be worse of because of it. And while that is completely true on the surface, it really isn`t, when you dig a big deeper. Because simultaneously with the exemption the test was also made much more difficult, even though this was never implemented because of the change in government after the election last year.
And of course these two things are related. If you can exempt those people, you like, from various demands, you have much more leeway to tighten the rules further for those, you don’t like. By excepting applicants from OECD-countries from the immigration test, the provious government decreased the risk of really bad news media stories of e.g. resource strong danish-american families giving Denmark the fuck-finger and moving their tax payments elsewere, which might had turned the public opinion against the law.