EVERY morning Nanna Hvedstrup sets off from her home in the Swedish town of Malmo and crosses the Oresund bridge to the insurance office where she works in her native Copenhagen.

Her 35-minute cross-border commute is not undertaken by choice. Hvedstrup, married to a New Zealander, has fallen foul of stringent immigration rules that have turned her and an estimated 1,000 of her fellow Danes into involuntary exiles.

When the couple married in 2003, Hvedstrup was 23 — below the minimum age of 24 the Danish government has set for people wanting to marry someone from outside the European Union and bring their spouse back to Denmark.

Although now old enough to return to her own country, she is unable to meet financial criteria, including a requirement to lodge a £5,000 deposit for the seven years it could take her husband to obtain permanent residence.

“With only me working full-time at the moment and with us having to move back and buy a place, there is no way we could deposit that sort of money,” said Hvedstrup, part of a growing Danish colony that has sprung up in more liberal Sweden, prompting the link between the cities to be nicknamed “the love bridge”.

Since coming to power nearly four years ago, Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s centre-right government has imposed some of the toughest regulations in the EU on asylum seekers and others who want to settle in Denmark.

The results have been striking: the number of people from outside the EU who were allowed to join spouses or other close family members fell from 10,950 in 2001 to 3,835 last year. Only 1,607 people were granted asylum in 2004 — down from 6,263 three years earlier.

The apparent success of the “Danish model” is being studied closely in Britain and other EU countries where immigration is a hotly contested political issue.

Hvedstrup’s woes are a side effect of rules dating from 2002. The rules are also part of a concerted government effort to reduce the number of Turks and other members of Denmark’s 500,000-strong ethnic minorities who take husbands and wives from their country of origin, often in marriages forced on them by their parents.

“The largest beneficiaries of our ‘24-year-old rule’ are young Muslim girls,” said Rikke Hvilshoj, who became immigration minister after Fogh Rasmussen’s government was re-elected in February. “Arranged and forced marriages are a problem. This rule means we can make sure that the young have time to get an education.”

Conditions have been made harder for asylum seekers too. Benefits have been cut to levels 15%-20% below those paid to Danes, while many of those given the right to stay do not obtain permanent residence until they have waited for seven years. They can be deported in the meantime if the situation in their homeland is deemed to have improved.

Critics claim the laws are unfair and breach the European convention on human rights. Nils Erik Hansen, who heads a Copenhagen-based organisation that helps people claiming to have suffered discrimination, is studying government rulings on 40 couples in a process that might end at the European Court of Human Rights.

“The idea of this law was to treat people equally badly,” said Hansen. “They argued that young people were forced into marriages by their parents, which is true, but it’s very small compared to the very large number affected by these rules.”

The Danish government is undaunted, claiming the cut in new arrivals has provided a breathing space that helps immigrants who have already settled in the country.

“Up until the end of the 1990s, our communities had a tough time integrating the new people moving in because they came in larger and larger numbers,” said Hvilshoj.

The Danish example is already being followed in Holland, another once-liberal country where politics have been dominated by asylum, immigration and integration since the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the populist anti-immigration politician, in 2002.

The Dutch government tightened the rules on immigration last November, introducing a “21-year-old” rule on marriages. Despite signs of a growing liberal backlash, it is also pushing ahead with the gradual expulsion of 26,000 asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected.

Britain’s Home Office — concerned about forced marriages among some British Asians — has said it is also studying suggestions that both partners in marriages involving someone from outside the EU should be over 21.

Immigration is an increasingly prominent political issue in Germany, where Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister, has been under fire since it emerged that his ministry had handed out thousands of visas to Ukrainians posing as tourists who then entered the country to work illegally, many as prostitutes.

Other countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction to Denmark.

Spain’s Socialist government announced a relaxation of rules in February under which an estimated 800,000 immigrants, mostly from Latin America and Morocco, could obtain work permits.

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