The call came on a Friday. When it came, I thought my boss was going to congratulate me for winning a research prize just announced that morning. Instead, she told me I would be contacted shortly by the Danish police; the university had just learnt that I was facing criminal charges for violating my work and residence permit.

My crime: giving lectures on my academic research to the Danish Parliament and to government agencies, at their request. That year, 2017, I had given five such lectures, a task normally considered an obligation, and an honour for a professor like me. Yet each had been declared a crime because I was an immigrant from a non-European Union country.