{"id":234297,"date":"2025-12-15T17:19:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T17:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/234297\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T17:19:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T17:19:07","slug":"iceland-charts-an-irish-course-on-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/234297\/","title":{"rendered":"Iceland Charts an Irish Course on Immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Famously homogeneous Iceland is becoming an immigration country, and it is following the Irish process to a tee.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A largely agrarian and fishing society incorporated into an overseas kingdom (in this case, Denmark\u2019s), Iceland gained independence and transformed its society in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Seemingly overnight, the Icelanders were a wealthy people. Secular liberalism replaced Lutheranism as the state religion. The country followed a typically Nordic course on social matters, but it managed to perpetuate itself. Well into this century, the Icelandic fertility rate remained above replacement levels. At the turn of the millennium, decades after Multikulti had arrived in Western Europe, Iceland still had a foreign-background population of under five percent, much of which came from other Nordic nations. Iceland joined the European Economic Area during the booming 1990s. Bank privatization drove an economy built on risky investment-banking practices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Following the 2004 EU expansion, Icelandic construction was booming, and foreign labourers began to arrive, largely from Poland, though also from regional neighbours like Lithuania and Slovakia. The influx was unprecedented, though still largely European. Surely this all sounds familiar.<\/p>\n

In 2008, the country\u2019s three biggest private commercial banks failed, creating the largest banking collapse, in relative terms, in history. The country required a sovereign-debt package from the IMF and Nordic neighbours. Native fertility crashed, and Icelanders emigrated. It should have ushered in an era of restraint.<\/p>\n

Iceland\u2019s post-recovery period has been anything but restrained. The country\u2019s economy has remained highly dependent on tourism and other services fuelled by cheap labour. Journalist Egill Bjarnason asserted the talking points of Official Iceland in his 2021 book How Iceland Changed the World: \u201cWithout immigrants, the [tourism-related] growth would have been impossible to sustain: every second job added to the economy in recent years has, eventually, been filled by someone not yet living in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

In certain industries, like taxi-driving, wages have plummeted below subsistence levels for native Icelanders. A familiar vicious cycle has commenced: As an influx of foreigners drives down wages and drives up real-estate prices, young Icelanders flee abroad for better economic prospects. Thus, the rate at which foreign-origin population growth exceeds the Icelandic undergoes a multiplying effect.<\/p>\n

Refugee and asylum policy inspires more headlines than the inexorable economic migration. In 2015, perceiving the government was insufficiently welcoming, well-to-do Icelanders announced their homes were open to Syrians fleeing their country\u2019s civil war. In 2019, the government announced the country would resettle 75 Africans claiming asylum on account of LGBT persecution. Gar\u00f0ab\u00e6r, something of a Reykjav\u00edkian D\u00fan Laoghaire, took in ten of these newcomers to great fanfare.<\/p>\n

Open-markets-and-borders liberalism is responsible for most of the country\u2019s spiralling demographic disaster, but even these comparatively small asylum-seeking populations are marking Icelandic society. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Iceland ruled a Syrian refugee had repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl student at the school where he worked. A district court had cited cultural misunderstandings to dismiss the more serious rape charge. Despite this subsequent ruling, he will spend just five years in prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ironically, a secretary to a former prime minister had celebrated the culprit\u2019s family as an integration success story at the 2019 Global Refugee Forum. Certain neighbourhoods, particularly in the Capital Region and the settlements abutting Keflav\u00edk Airport, have already become unrecognizable. Brei\u00f0holt, a working-class district of Reykjav\u00edk, is arguably the most notable example. One well-known basketball coach nicknamed it \u201cBaby Malm\u00f6.\u201d It is comfortably distant from the luxury of Gar\u00f0ab\u00e6r and the tourist attractions of central Reykjav\u00edk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thus, the inevitable solution for the Icelandic professional-managerial class is to throw more money at the problem. A Reykjav\u00edk teacher sparked debate in 2024, when he wrote an editorial describing how 90 percent of his school\u2019s students were of foreign origin, and none, even among the small number of Icelanders, could understand the sentence, \u201cThe heart pumps blood.\u201d Predictably, he concluded by writing, five times, \u201cThe state needs to provide funding for the primary school system.\u201d<\/p>\n

High trust is among the bedrocks of Icelandic society than cannot be financialized. In 2024, when three male migrants disrupted a session of the Al\u00feingi by climbing over the upper-gallery railing, it drew\u00a0 attention to the fact that Iceland\u2019s parliament is shockingly accessible by international standards. Last month, the nation was stunned at social-media content allegedly depicting Middle Eastern men showing off assault rifles and handguns in central Reykjav\u00edk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions recently told an interviewer how a Muslim migrant threatened to kill him. Iceland has recently become acquainted with Islamic extremism and foreign gangs. It is all deeply disruptive for a country that, until recently, featured virtually no violent crime and still houses a quarter of its prisoners in open prisons.<\/p>\n

The political atmosphere is arguably less oppressive than Ireland\u2019s, but only just. The Centre Party (Mi\u00f0flokkurinn), currently in opposition, is increasingly positioning itself as a voice against the demographic onslaught. Its deputy party leader, Snorri M\u00e1sson, is a twenty-eight-year-old former journalist who has established himself as the most vocal anti-migration personality in Icelandic politics. \u201cIf the number of foreign residents continues to grow more than twice as fast as the number of Icelanders, native inhabitants will end up in the minority here in the country after a few decades,\u201d he wrote after a debate in the Al\u00feingi this month. \u201cThe consequences will be devasting and irreversible\u2026[w]e may need to use our provisions within the EEA agreement to take control of the flow of people to this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Momentum is gathering, but the Centre Party is still just fifth-largest in the Al\u00feingi.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Political, academic, and managerial elites remain militantly opposed to any suggestion that migration has negative consequences. Last month, for example, news outlet V\u00edsir published a headline piece proclaiming Snorri M\u00e1sson a racist, with an accompanying photograph of him holding his two-year-old child (later edited). Many anti-migration Icelanders still avoid identifying themselves by name, for fear of professional or social consequences.<\/p>\n

If Irish observers can rightfully view their country as a trend-setter, rather than follower, in the North Atlantic, they might still look ahead to developments in tiny Iceland. The country now has a foreign-origin population exceeding 20 percent, and projections indeed suggest Icelanders will be a minority in mere decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not long ago, Reykjav\u00edkians would grow frustrated at their fellow citizens for mechanically using English out of convenience. Now Icelandic-language conversations are often impossible in shops, restaurants, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe country is to be sold,\u201d we read repeatedly in Nobel laureate Halld\u00f3r Laxness\u2019s 1948 novel The Atom Station, a biting criticism of his country\u2019s leaders choosing military and economic vassalage. In Ireland, as in Iceland, the sentiment is dismally relevant.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Michael O\u2019Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a Danube Institute visiting international fellow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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