Famously homogeneous Iceland is becoming an immigration country, and it is following the Irish process to a tee.
A largely agrarian and fishing society incorporated into an overseas kingdom (in this case, Denmark’s), Iceland gained independence and transformed its society in the twentieth century.
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.
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.
In 2008, the country’s 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.
Iceland’s post-recovery period has been anything but restrained. The country’s 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: “Without 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.”
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.
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’s civil war. In 2019, the government announced the country would resettle 75 Africans claiming asylum on account of LGBT persecution. Garðabær, something of a Reykjavíkian Dún Laoghaire, took in ten of these newcomers to great fanfare.
Open-markets-and-borders liberalism is responsible for most of the country’s 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.
Ironically, a secretary to a former prime minister had celebrated the culprit’s family as an integration success story at the 2019 Global Refugee Forum. Certain neighbourhoods, particularly in the Capital Region and the settlements abutting Keflavík Airport, have already become unrecognizable. Breiðholt, a working-class district of Reykjavík, is arguably the most notable example. One well-known basketball coach nicknamed it “Baby Malmö.” It is comfortably distant from the luxury of Garðabær and the tourist attractions of central Reykjavík.
Thus, the inevitable solution for the Icelandic professional-managerial class is to throw more money at the problem. A Reykjavík teacher sparked debate in 2024, when he wrote an editorial describing how 90 percent of his school’s students were of foreign origin, and none, even among the small number of Icelanders, could understand the sentence, “The heart pumps blood.” Predictably, he concluded by writing, five times, “The state needs to provide funding for the primary school system.”
High trust is among the bedrocks of Icelandic society than cannot be financialized. In 2024, when three male migrants disrupted a session of the Alþingi by climbing over the upper-gallery railing, it drew attention to the fact that Iceland’s 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 Reykjavík.
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.
The political atmosphere is arguably less oppressive than Ireland’s, but only just. The Centre Party (Miðflokkurinn), currently in opposition, is increasingly positioning itself as a voice against the demographic onslaught. Its deputy party leader, Snorri Másson, is a twenty-eight-year-old former journalist who has established himself as the most vocal anti-migration personality in Icelandic politics. “If 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,” he wrote after a debate in the Alþingi this month. “The consequences will be devasting and irreversible…[w]e may need to use our provisions within the EEA agreement to take control of the flow of people to this country.”
Momentum is gathering, but the Centre Party is still just fifth-largest in the Alþingi.
Political, academic, and managerial elites remain militantly opposed to any suggestion that migration has negative consequences. Last month, for example, news outlet Vísir published a headline piece proclaiming Snorri Másson 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.
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.
Not long ago, Reykjavíkians 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.
“The country is to be sold,” we read repeatedly in Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s 1948 novel The Atom Station, a biting criticism of his country’s leaders choosing military and economic vassalage. In Ireland, as in Iceland, the sentiment is dismally relevant.
Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a Danube Institute visiting international fellow.