spectator.org
The Extinction of Icelanders
Despite overwhelming evidence, the replacement of European societies remains — frustratingly — a contested concept. Across the continent, cities and towns are unrecognizable. Novel social ills confront Europeans who remember better days. Corporate media regularly broadcast projections of minority-native populations later this century. Despite this incontrovertible evidence, institutional figures still insist replacement is a “far-right” conspiracy theory.
In diminutive, secluded Iceland, the crisis has arrived. The extinction of the Icelandic people cannot be dismissed as a theory. More accurately, it is a civilizational crime.
According to estimates from Statistics Iceland, the country’s population will reach half a million within 16 years, up from an estimated 392,000 today. In 2020, the population stood at 354,000, an increase from 317,000 in 2010. As in other European countries, immigration will drive this projected population growth. Until 2012, following Iceland’s catastrophic banking collapse, the country maintained a birth rate above replacement level, but that figure has swiftly sagged to 1.56 children per woman of childbearing age. Nonetheless, the country will grow rapidly, and it will be considerably less Icelandic.
Even assuming modest inflows, Icelanders will be a minority in their land within three or four decades.
Statistics Iceland forecasts that the country will absorb a net migration of over 85,000 people by 2042. By comparison, the country experienced a net migration of 61,000 people from 1986 to 2024, a period of unprecedented immigration to the secluded, long-homogeneous island. Next year alone, the country expects to receive over 5,000 newcomers. Currently, over 20 percent of the population is of immigrant origin. Even assuming modest inflows, Icelanders will be a minority in their land within three or four decades. (RELATED: The Vanishing Englishman: Inside the Schools Forecasting the UK Future)
This process arguably started in 1994, when Iceland joined the European Economic Area. Large numbers of foreigners began to arrive in 2005, soon after the European Union welcomed ten mostly Central and Eastern European members. These were primarily Poles who arrived to boost Iceland’s thriving economy, though Lithuanians and Slovaks also contributed to the regional flavor. (RÚV, the national broadcaster, now offers content in English and Polish, in addition to Icelandic.) Many of these migrants arrived to work construction jobs, often in the secluded Westfjords and Eastern Region. (RELATED: Asylum to Austerity: Germany Leads Europe’s Retreat From Open-Ended Migration)
The Icelandic economy crumbled in the catastrophic banking collapse of 2008-11. By 2015, after emerging from the wreckage, Iceland featured an immigrant-origin population of nearly nine percent. At this point, Icelandic leaders should have rejected short-sighted economic exploits, foreign-labor dependence, and NGO soft power. Like their counterparts in Ireland, they embraced all three, and migrants began to arrive from culturally distant locales in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. (RELATED: Ireland Just Sealed Its Fate on Mass Migration)
“Visitor numbers have quadrupled over the past decade, making Iceland’s economy among the most tourist-dependent in the Western world,” wrote Egill Bjarnason in his 2021 book How Iceland Changed the World. “Without immigrants, the 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,” he added approvingly. In the classic Western formula, growth and diversity are indisputably desirable ends. They have wrought liberal horrors in just one short decade.
An outspoken basketball coach has coined the nickname “Little Malmö” for Breiðholt, a working-class district of Reykjavík that has rapidly developed a high concentration of migrants. Foreign gangs have arrived from continental Europe’s migrant-heavy districts. Schoolchildren have encountered violence from culturally distant classmates. Episodes of migrant street violence circulate online, even when Icelandic media choose not to cover them.
High-trust Iceland is also no longer immune to conspicuous cases of culture shock. Last year, three male migrants interrupted a session of the Alþingi (Parliament), with one climbing over the upper-gallery railing, during a debate on asylum policy. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Iceland ruled that a Syrian migrant had repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl student from the school where he worked. This came after a district court had cited cultural misunderstandings to dismiss the most serious charges. He will walk free in just five years.
This week, a video of Middle Eastern men in Reykjavík, brandishing what appear to be assault rifles and pistols on top of vehicles, began to circulate online. In response, police closed a street in central Reykjavík, though police spokesmen and journalists were initially silent on the matter. Eventually, the story could no longer be contained, and politicians addressed the incident in a country where non-hunting firearms are rare and gun crime has been nearly nonexistent.
Helgi Magnús Gunnarsson, a former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, told an interviewer the West is “sleeping in the face of a cultural revolution” by permitting mass migration from Muslim countries, and he related an episode in which a Muslim migrant allegedly threatened to kill him. According to Gunnarsson, Israeli intelligence officials have warned about extremist elements among some men newly admitted to Iceland.
As in other European countries, Iceland’s politicians, journalists, and academics are fiercely defensive of pro-migration orthodoxy in the public sphere. As evidenced in the firearm-video affair, Icelandic media try to suppress stories that paint migration in a negative light. Political figures like Social Democratic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir have been unwilling to say anything remotely critical on the subject. “We must bear in mind that the proportion of immigrants in Iceland has grown extremely rapidly in just a few years, and naturally this makes people think,” she stated this summer.
Already in his 2010 book Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon spoke of “profound effects on Icelandic society that many native Icelanders have still not adjusted to,” suggesting it is their unfortunate character flaw. “At the turn of this millennia [sic], when the Icelandic population was only 2.5 percent foreign-born, few envisioned that Húsavík, a traditional port town, would be home to twenty-six different nationalities only twenty years later,” wrote the aforementioned Bjarnason in 2021. “These are exciting times to be in Iceland, suddenly the land of opportunities.”
They are less exciting for Icelanders publicly contesting this issue. Some are willing to do so only anonymously, for fear of professional repercussions. In the Icelandic political scene, only the opposition Centre Party (Miðflokkurinn), currently the fifth-largest party in the Alþingi, is reliably critical of prevailing migration policies. “The unique heritage of generations and the historical continuity of a thousand years are at stake,” wrote party deputy chairman Snorri Másson in a bold editorial last month. Online news website Vísir rewarded him this month with a headline article calling him a racist; the accompanying photo (later updated) showed him holding his two-year-old child, a gesture many Icelanders found to be distasteful. The national political landscape will need to transform rapidly if Icelanders are to stave off extinction through policy initiatives.
Icelanders perceive their country as being rapidly consigned to the status of economic zone — an English-speaking one, to boot. Noting a lack of Icelandic historical analysis in foreign languages, historian Gunnar Karlsson wrote thus in his 2000 study The History of Iceland: “[T]he history of Iceland is for the most part a secret kept for those who can read the language which has developed in the country through eleven centuries.” It is a secret that will be lost if the Icelandic population replacement continues unabated. If that comes to pass, it will rank as one of the great civilizational crimes of our time.
READ MORE from Michael O’Shea:
Ireland Is a Democratic Late Starter
It’s Past High Noon for Poland’s Liberals
What Next for Poland After Nawrocki Victory?
Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a Danube Institute visiting international fellow.
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