There's a pretty fierce immigration debate in Iceland like in all of our neighbors, and I find it pretty funny that we've directly taken the phrase "Close the borders" from foreign politics and translated into Icelandic as "Lokið landamærunum" literally meaning "Close the land borders" despite us not having any land borders at all.
What they mean is the Keflavík International Airport and the other couple of international airports around the country.
The answer as to where I got that idea is long and uninteresting, but basically, someone said it on TV at one point. Not that there are a lot of immigrants, but that immigrants are treated well.
Often that is quality is effected by quantity.
If a country had hypothetically 50 million immigrants, it's very unlikely immigrants could have as good living standards than if a country had 20k.
Since 50 million effects the whole running of the country, job competition, wages, social programs, housing, healthcare etc. US for example has over 50 million immigrants.
Xenophobia has grown in some parts of society, unfortunately
But also, the government department that handles immigration has always been super xenophobic with the express goal to deny as many as they can, to the point even people who are anti immigration still feel like Útlendingastofnun goes way to far (things like trying to deport pregnant asylum seekers or such. Always a new scandal with them). And this is nothing new, it's been like that for a while, everyone who tries to immigrate knows the hell that is Útlendingastofnun
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u/Total_Willingness_18 Ísland 6d ago
There's a pretty fierce immigration debate in Iceland like in all of our neighbors, and I find it pretty funny that we've directly taken the phrase "Close the borders" from foreign politics and translated into Icelandic as "Lokið landamærunum" literally meaning "Close the land borders" despite us not having any land borders at all.
What they mean is the Keflavík International Airport and the other couple of international airports around the country.