As dark fell over the Øresund bridge on Monday evening, up to 8,000 commuters in Denmark were stuck in 45-minute delays on their route back to Sweden. Getting home, they feared, would take them twice as long as usual.

This was no ordinary traffic jam on the crossing made famous by the TV crime drama The Bridge. It was the result of new identity checks brought in by Sweden at midnight on Sunday in a crackdown on refugees.

But for the thousands of people who commute between the two countries for work, it was an annoyance – and a depressing one at that.

“The Scandinavian ideal of living and working together, where everyone could travel freely, it’s gone,” said Christian Müller-Hansen, 39, a Dane who works in tech innovation in Copenhagen and has family in Malmö, across the bridge. “We need to be able to travel hassle-free, and we’re going to lose a lot of money in Scandinavia because of this. It’s tragic.”

The targets of the Swedish border controls, which apply to trains, buses and ferries, are not commuters. The people who will be hit hardest by them are refugees like Bahman, an Iraqi Kurd who on Monday stood in Copenhagen’s central station looking drained and defeated. On Sunday night he made three attempts to get across the Øresund bridge and was turned back each time.

“I want to go be with my family, I don’t want to stay in Sweden,” said the 29-year-old mechanic. He wanted to join his brother and sister in Norway but had been stopped at the Swedish border and told he either had to apply for asylum there or go back to Denmark.

Neither country had much to offer him, he said, so he would return to a refugee camp in Germany. “It is a sad thing that people can’t travel to their loved ones, to their family.”

Barely four months ago, Sweden’s social democratic prime minister, Stefan Löfven, told crowds in Stockholm that the Europe he loved did not erect barriers to those fleeing war. He backed up his words with actions – Sweden in 2015 took in 163,000 asylum seekers, more even than Germany in proportion to its population.

But now a fence separates the rail platforms at Copenhagen airport to prevent refugees crossing the tracks. Passengers to Sweden must change trains to have their documents inspected and photographed.

Those without a passport or a driving licence will be turned back by Securitas, the private security firm hired by Danish railways to police the new system. The photographs are necessary to prove that an identity check has taken place and thus avoid a fine of 50,000 Swedish krona (£4,000) for each refugee who turns up in Sweden without documents.

On Monday, within 12 hours of the Swedish crackdown, Denmark’s liberal government announced it would carry out its threat to impose similar measures on its border with Germany, fulfilling critics’ fears of a domino effect across Europe as governments try to push the problem back beyond their territory.

“When other Nordic countries try to plug up their borders, it can lead to more refugees and migrants halting their journey north and therefore ending up with us, in Denmark,” the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said when he announced the border controls. Stockholm welcomed Copenhagen’s decision, saying it would further cut the flow of refugees to Sweden.

But in Berlin it was greeted icily. “Freedom of movement is an important principle – one of the biggest achievements [in the European Union] in recent years,” the German foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told reporters. “[The] Schengen [agreement, which brought about freedom of movement in Europe] is very important but it is in danger.”

The Øresund bridge, which links Sweden and Denmark. Photograph: Sven Rosenhall/Getty Images/Nordic Photos

Some refugee aid organisations are critical of Sweden for introducing measures which they fear could be copied elsewhere in Europe.

“The Swedish government says the system is collapsing, I find that ridiculous,” said Anna Carlstedt, president of the Swedish Red Cross. “We are talking about one of the richest countries in the world, which has its infrastructure intact. We have thousands of places where we can put people.”

Looking at the EU as a whole, she said, “it is starting to smell like the 1930s”. In Copenhagen, however, volunteers are more sympathetic to the reasons for Sweden’s U-turn on refugees.

“In Denmark we have not taken our share of responsibility, so it’s been on the shoulders of Sweden,” said Line Søgaard, a spokesperson for Welcome to Denmark, which acts as an umbrella for refugee support groups. “After opening its borders for quite a while, their infrastructure is very stressed and they can’t keep up with the numbers. So Sweden is left with very few options.”

Søgaard said one group was looking at how it could help refugees get into Sweden by other means. In September the group organised boats to Sweden and tried to establish a network of drivers and contacts in northern Scandinavia. Cars are still subject only to random checks at the Swedish end of the Øresund bridge.

Numbers of asylum seekers had already fallen sharply before the border controls came into effect. Sweden received fewer than 14,000 applications in December, down from 39,000 in October, while the number in Denmark more than halved to 2,700 last month.

Border controls in both countries enjoy cross-party support, with just a few exceptions. In Sweden, the small but influential Centre party says they are panic measures that are “inhuman, ineffective, and bad economics”.

Anders Åkesson, a transport spokesperson for the party, said: “Part of the motivation is to stop terrorists, but we don’t think terrorists are going to come by train, and if they do, you can be certain they will have excellent ID.”

Two party members have established a Facebook group called Öresund Revolution to oppose the controls, which in the space of two weeks has gathered 20,000 followers from across the political spectrum.

“People are worried about the economic impact, but also the sheer political arrogance of central government against our region,” said Mats Genberg, 52, a businessman in Simrishamn, on Sweden’s southern coast, who founded the group. “Copenhagen airport is more important to us than Stockholm ever was, while taking the train across the bridge is for us what the metro is for the capital.”

The measures are a blow to economic integration of the two neighbouring regions, said Frank Jensen, mayor of Copenhagen, who has a vision for creating a hub that can rival international cities. “This step is a setback in the development of the Greater Copenhagen region, and it will make daily life for thousands of people more complicated.”