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Deported ‘super student’ to return to Denmark

Marius Youbi, a Cameroonian engineering student at Aarhus University who gained national attention when we he was deported for working too much, is on his way back to Denmark.

Published: 3 February 2016 11:05 CET

Deported 'super student' to return to Denmark

A dejected Marius Youbi left Denmark last month but now will return for a new job. Screenshot: DR/YouTube

The 31-year-old was forced to leave the country last month after the Recruitment and Integration Authority (Styrelsen for International Rekruttering og Integration – STAR) revoked his residence permit.

Yourbi was found to have spent 16 and a half hours a week in a cleaning job, taking him around an hour and a half over the limit permitted for international students. As a result, he was asked to leave the country despite petitions and rallies supporting his cause.

While Yourbi’s case was held up as an example of a broken immigration system, it turns out his absence from Denmark will be short-lived.

Local newspaper Herning Folkeblad reported on Tuesday that Yourbi has been hired as an engineer by the Ikast company KK Wind Solutions. With the new job comes a permanent residence permit that will allow him to resume his life in Denmark.

“It is really great news. I cannot even describe how happy I am,” Youbi told Herning Folkeblad.

His permit will run through 2018 and can be renewed if he is still employed by a Danish company.

Youbi’s case first grabbed national headlines in December, when he was told to leave the country by January 8th.

After Aarhus University agreed to move the student's exams forward, Youbi then aced three tests in one day, with just 48 hours to prepare. All three exams resulted in a '12' grade, the Danish equivalent of an A.

A spokesman for his new employer said that by offering Youbi a job, they had secured a young talent.

“First of all we feel like Marius should be allowed to finish his education. Secondly, with this job offer we have gotten an advance on a recruitment that would have almost certainly happened later anyway,” Henrik Lykke Christiansen told Herning Folkeblad.

Youbi said he anticipates returning to Denmark within two weeks.

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Denmark suspends asylum centre talks with Rwanda

The Scandinavian country’s plans, first announced by the previous Social Democratic government, called for people seeking asylum in Denmark to be transferred to reception centres outside the European Union while their requests were processed.

A law adopted in June 2021 did not specify which country would host the centre, but said asylum seekers should stay there even after they were granted refugee status.

Discussions were launched with Rwanda and other countries, but they have now been suspended since the installation of a new Danish left-right government in December headed by the Social Democrats.

“We are not holding any negotiations at the moment about the establishment of a Danish reception centre in Rwanda”, Migration and Integration Minister Kaare Dybvad told daily Altinget.

“This is a new government. We still have the same ambition, but we have a different process”, he added. “The new government’s programme calls for the establishment of a reception centre outside Europe “in cooperation with the EU or a number of other countries”.

The change is an about-face for the Social Democrats, which had until now rejected any European collaboration, judging it slow and thorny.

“While the wider approach also makes sense to us, [Denmark’s change of heart] is precisely because there has been movement on the issue among many European countries”, Dybvad said. “There are many now pushing for a stricter asylum policy in Europe”, he said.

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Inger Støjberg, leader of the Denmark Democrats said on Facebook that she was “honestly disgusted” by the government’s decision to delay plans for a reception centre in Rwanda, pointing out that Kaare Dybvad had said during the election campaign that a deal would be done with Rwanda within a year.

“Call us old-fashioned, but we say the same thing both before and after an election. We stand firm on a strict immigration policy. The Social Democrats, Liberals and Moderates clearly do not,” she said.

Lars Boje Mathiesen from the New Right Party accused the government of perpetrating a “deadly fraud” on the Danish people.

“It is said in Christiansborg that it is paused. But we all know what that means,” he wrote on Facebook, accusing Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen of “empty words” in the run-up to the election.

In the face of this reaction, Dybvad told the Ritzau newswire that although talks with Rwanda were not happening at present, the government had not given up on a deal with the African nation. He also said that he was confident that asylum reception centres outside of the EU would be a reality within five years.

EU interior ministers are meeting in Stockholm this week to discuss asylum reform. Those talks are expected to focus on how to speed up the process of returning undocumented migrants to their country of origin in cases where their asylum bid fails.

Denmark’s immigration policy has been influenced by the far-right for more than 20 years. Even Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the head of the Social Democrats, has pursued a “zero refugee” policy since coming to power in 2019.

Copenhagen has over the years implemented a slew of initiatives to discourage migrants and made Danish citizenship harder to obtain. In 2020, it became the only country in Europe to withdraw residency permits from Syrians from Damascus, judging that the situation there was now safe enough for them to return.

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