When I started investigating how to move to Denmark, I gave myself a deadline of 6 months to my date of departure. That’s not because I needed 6 months to get ready, but because that’s how long I thought it would take me to fill out the visa form.
Reading government documents is hard. I can read a novel for hours, but I’ll spend 2 minutes reading the first page of a form over and over again, without comprehension, before I give up out of exhaustion.
I’m writing this out because getting all this information was a huge struggle for me, and I hope someone else can benefit from it.
Working Holiday
I succeeded in applying for the simplest Danish visa you can get. That’s the working holiday. You can have that one if you’re under 35 and can prove you have at least $3500 in your bank account to support yourself during your first months in Denmark. You have to present yourself in person at the Danish/Norwegian embassy in Vancouver and pay around $700 in fees.
The visa application isn’t a simple PDF form. It’s an “internet portal” with a series of webforms that you have to fill out and can save for later, although the saving function is dodgy. You need to have scans of your documents, such as passport, travel insurance, and bank statements, to submit to the form.
With that visa, you can work for 6 months, study for 6 months, and stay for a year total. You can take Danish lessons for free, and they give you a social security number and health insurance card when you arrive. In your first week, you are supposed to report to the commune, basically city hall, and that’s when they sign you up for Danish lessons and the health card.
The health insurance card has the address and telephone number of your personal doctor written on it, and you can make an appointment to see them using their website. You don’t have to pay anything. You do have to have travel health insurance from your own country, though, to meet the visa requirements.
This is the visa that’s simple enough for teenage stoners who want to be baristas in Christiania and get high for a year. If you want to stay longer than that, you need an AR-1 or an FA-1.
AR-1
This is a residency permit you can get if you have a job. It’s good for one year and you can reapply. All you need to apply for it is a signed contract with your employer, stating the details of your employment, including date of hire, length of contract (or whether it’s a permanent job), any other benefits they offer like maternity leave, holiday, company car, etc.
Danish employers don’t need to pay a fee to import you or anything, and there is a JobCenter in each municipality where there are people who are supposed to help you get hired. They’re not much smarter than job center employees anywhere else, but they can help you write a resume, point you to some job boards and sometimes they have hiring fairs.
I applied to ten or twenty jobs and wasn’t hired, so my information is not necessarily the best in this area. But the key things I learned are that 1) if it’s a low skill or “easy” job, generally a Dane will be hired for it because Danes are kind of racist and they all have nephews who need jobs. This is the same everywhere on earth, of course.
However, if you are an engineer, they want you. Electrical, chemical engineers, manufacturing, mechanical, and software engineers are so hot that they’re the subjects of national advertising campaigns. This is true everywhere on earth as well.
If you can’t manage to be an engineer, try being a programmer. Stick to C#, C++, C, and Assembly, and you might get somewhere. Tradesmen are mostly not wanted, but medical techs are.
There are huge employers like Maersk, Danfoss and Lego, and they do hire a lot of people. But if send your application to one of these no one will ever see it. Try finding a company making weird little microcontrollers tucked away in an office park somewhere. You might have better luck there.
In my case, I’m a programmer but I can’t seem to convince employers that I can learn C# on the job. I had a remote job with an American company, and I wasn’t sure whether the immigration people would buy that. However, if you read page 16 of the AR-1 form, you’ll see this section: “16.C Information about the applicant’s salary when seconded to Denmark by a foreign-based company “.
It seems to imply that your company is requiring you to live in Denmark, which is not the case for remote work. But nothing specific in that section rules out remote work.
It took me many months to gain this information, because I read the forms several times without actually taking the information in. I’m not sure what went wrong with my brain, but I’m back in Canada kicking myself for it.
FA-1
If you can’t get hired but you have a lover that you don’t want to leave, you can use the FA-1 form, which is for Family Reunification. Here are the requirements for that: https://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Family/Family-reunification/Spouse-or-cohabiting-partner
When you drill down into that list, you’ll find that the requirements are quite lax. For example, you have to have a stronger attachment to Denmark than any other country. This means that you cannot have spent more than 6 months in a country besides Denmark in the past year. So if you spent a year on a working holiday visa, you meet that requirement. If you lived with your partner for that year, you could, for example, take an education for 6 months until you’ve cohabited for 18 months, and you’ll meet the cohabitation requirement. Protip – if your Danish lover asks you to marry him, don’t stall him with bullshit about how “marriage is a social construct” while you try to squint through a crystal ball into the future. Just say yes.
You also have to pass a Danish language test. It’s the A1 test, which is the easiest level they have. Relevant to me personally, “If you are blind, deaf or have some other form of disability that prevents you from taking the exam, you might not need to take the exam.” I’m deaf, and being deaf sure does make it difficult to pass an oral language exam.
The toughest part of this visa is that your Danish partner needs to put up 50,000kr in escrow with the municipality, in case you need social services while you’re there. You can have the money back eventually.
If you can pull it off, I think this is a great way to go. Danes are always travelling the world since they take 6 weeks of vacation every year, and they always spend it outside of Denmark because every other place on earth is cheaper. So you tend to run into them on beaches, hiking trails and in tourist bars, and they’re very easy to fall in love with. Just follow one home.
Good luck – Denmark is a strange place, but it will capture your heart.