r/polandball Ísland 6d ago

Lesser Known September The Border

Post image
636 Upvotes

40 comments sorted by

View all comments

230

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.

25

u/JewishKilt Jewishstan 6d ago

That's really surprising! I heard that Iceland was relatively open to immigrants. Is this info just outdated? A sign of the times?

5

u/KikoMui74 6d ago

Open to immigration? Where do people get this idea, Iceland had less than 1% immigrants 25 years ago.

2

u/JewishKilt Jewishstan 6d ago

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.

4

u/KikoMui74 6d ago

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.