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Iceland with 80% of immigrants would not be Iceland any more. Its language and culture would be completely marginalised and replaced with something else.

by zirgs 4y ago

steveBK123 4y ago
No one is saying Iceland should take 80% immigrants. A rational conversation is that US takes a higher % of immigrants than most of the developed world. No one sane is comparing notional numbers comparing a 330M country & small 5M countries. Talking % terms means it doesn't matter the base size.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Talking % terms means it doesn't matter the base size. I think wether or not it matters depends on whether the effects of an increase is linear, sub linear, exponential, etc.
distances 4y ago
That's a bogus reason though. No culture is static, Japan or US or Germany 100 years ago were very different to the current day. Culture is how citizens live their lives, and it's pointless to try to immortalize something that is naturally in constant flux.
- ericmay 4y ago
  On the other hand, what rights do people have or not have to preserve their culture or their way of life? An exaggerated example, but a good litmus test here is something simple like are you ok with lots of Americans moving to country X (let's use China and Norway) and making it culturally more like America? You can't say that this is a problem but then Iceland (since that's the example we're using) being weary of accepting large numbers of immigrants out of fear of culture change isn't a valid concern also.
  - avar 4y ago
    Iceland's combined first- and second generation immigration is around 18% of the total population[1], [2] seems to suggest it's around 25% for the US. The country has also signed up to accept practically unlimited immigration. It's a part of the EEA (the economic area of the EU), meaning that a population of around 500 million can move there tomorrow with very few legal hurdles. "Unlimited" in the sense that the difference between 500 million and the world population of 8 billion hardly matters for a country with a population of far less than 1/2 million. 1. https://www.hagstofa.is/utgafur/frettasafn/mannfjoldi/mannfjoldi-eftir-bakgrunni-2022/ https://www.hagstofa.is/utgafur/frettasafn/mannfjoldi/mannfj... 2. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/P23-214.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Sure, but the practical limit is basically the attractiveness of an environment, economy & availability of jobs. All things being equal, how many people want to flock to Iceland to work in tourism and fishing? Maybe with the right immigrants one could replicate their last financial bubble & crisis.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    None of this actually requires immigration. Cultural imports are enough to utterly destroy aspects of local culture without a single person immigrating. I don't know about Norway or Iceland specifically, but I have been told that English is so trendy in Sweden that not a lot of cultural works are actually written in Swedish anymore. As for China, we've actually gotten cultural backwash from Hollywood doing so much business there. Specifically, a lot of western media companies have had to self-censor in order to retain Chinese market access. If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls. We would need to emulate pre-Meiji Japan in every country in the world: i.e. no migration whatsoever, and heavy restriction and censorship of cultural imports. So no Internet, no imported cinema or TV shows, no international phone calls... hell, no international postal system. Less dramatically you have countries like Canada or France that have local content quotas, but those have their own issues. But those are less "stop cultural change" and more "keep Hollywood from completely smothering our local creative industry".
- dropit_sphere 4y ago
  >No culture is static, indeed, the dodo would agree
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  The Santa Cruz I grew up in, with vibrant cultures from hippies to punkers is gone. All the people that lived there have been forced to move due to lack of affordability, and the people and local culture has been replaced with immigrants. While there is a town, culturally, it is not the town I grew up. If you asked us in the 80/early 90s if we wanted that, we would have said no, we would like to be able to live the life we created, have the neighbors we have known our whole lives, etc instead of being California refugees spread across Oregon/Washington/Idaho/Nevada/Hawaii. It's not really bogus to those peoples whose entire way of life is being displaced, and shouldn't they have a say and some sort of agency over their local culture?
avar 4y ago
As an Icelander, our traditional culture has already been completely marginalized and destroyed by the outlawing of piracy, as well as of raping and pillaging. If the rest of the world would agree to look the other way on those topics, I'm sure we could be persuaded to once again accept double-digit percentages of the population as sla..., ahem, immigrants every year.
kerpotgh 4y ago
It depends, if it’s slow enough you’ll end up with a hybrid culture that has parts of both.
hnbad 4y ago
Why is that a problem? Languages and culture change all the time. Iceland is hardly "Iceland" anymore compared to any sufficiently past "Iceland" (e.g. pre-Internet, pre-aviation, pre-motor vehicles, etc) but I don't see any reason why that is a bad thing in principle. This seems an odd concern to be raised in a language that can charitably be described as the bastard child of Norse and French mostly spoken by people who never sat foot in Great Britain. You also seem to assume all of those immigrants are culturally and language-wise homogeneous, which is unlikely to be the case unless, say, something catastrophic happens to Canada causing its population to flee to neighboring countries (and even then that's a bad example because Canada is heterogeneous itself).

Iceland with 80% of immigrants would not be Iceland any more. Its language and culture would be completely marginalised and replaced with something else.

by zirgs 4y ago

Iceland with 80% of immigrants would not be Iceland any more. Its language and culture would be completely marginalised and replaced with something else.

steveBK123 4y ago

No one is saying Iceland should take 80% immigrants. A rational conversation is that US takes a higher % of immigrants than most of the developed world. No one sane is comparing notional numbers comparing a 330M country & small 5M countries. Talking % terms means it doesn't matter the base size.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Talking % terms means it doesn't matter the base size. I think wether or not it matters depends on whether the effects of an increase is linear, sub linear, exponential, etc.

distances 4y ago

That's a bogus reason though. No culture is static, Japan or US or Germany 100 years ago were very different to the current day. Culture is how citizens live their lives, and it's pointless to try to immortalize something that is naturally in constant flux.

ericmay 4y ago
On the other hand, what rights do people have or not have to preserve their culture or their way of life? An exaggerated example, but a good litmus test here is something simple like are you ok with lots of Americans moving to country X (let's use China and Norway) and making it culturally more like America? You can't say that this is a problem but then Iceland (since that's the example we're using) being weary of accepting large numbers of immigrants out of fear of culture change isn't a valid concern also.
- avar 4y ago
  Iceland's combined first- and second generation immigration is around 18% of the total population[1], [2] seems to suggest it's around 25% for the US. The country has also signed up to accept practically unlimited immigration. It's a part of the EEA (the economic area of the EU), meaning that a population of around 500 million can move there tomorrow with very few legal hurdles. "Unlimited" in the sense that the difference between 500 million and the world population of 8 billion hardly matters for a country with a population of far less than 1/2 million. 1. https://www.hagstofa.is/utgafur/frettasafn/mannfjoldi/mannfjoldi-eftir-bakgrunni-2022/ https://www.hagstofa.is/utgafur/frettasafn/mannfjoldi/mannfj... 2. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/P23-214.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Sure, but the practical limit is basically the attractiveness of an environment, economy & availability of jobs. All things being equal, how many people want to flock to Iceland to work in tourism and fishing? Maybe with the right immigrants one could replicate their last financial bubble & crisis.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  None of this actually requires immigration. Cultural imports are enough to utterly destroy aspects of local culture without a single person immigrating. I don't know about Norway or Iceland specifically, but I have been told that English is so trendy in Sweden that not a lot of cultural works are actually written in Swedish anymore. As for China, we've actually gotten cultural backwash from Hollywood doing so much business there. Specifically, a lot of western media companies have had to self-censor in order to retain Chinese market access. If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls. We would need to emulate pre-Meiji Japan in every country in the world: i.e. no migration whatsoever, and heavy restriction and censorship of cultural imports. So no Internet, no imported cinema or TV shows, no international phone calls... hell, no international postal system. Less dramatically you have countries like Canada or France that have local content quotas, but those have their own issues. But those are less "stop cultural change" and more "keep Hollywood from completely smothering our local creative industry".
dropit_sphere 4y ago
>No culture is static, indeed, the dodo would agree
ROTMetro 4y ago
The Santa Cruz I grew up in, with vibrant cultures from hippies to punkers is gone. All the people that lived there have been forced to move due to lack of affordability, and the people and local culture has been replaced with immigrants. While there is a town, culturally, it is not the town I grew up. If you asked us in the 80/early 90s if we wanted that, we would have said no, we would like to be able to live the life we created, have the neighbors we have known our whole lives, etc instead of being California refugees spread across Oregon/Washington/Idaho/Nevada/Hawaii. It's not really bogus to those peoples whose entire way of life is being displaced, and shouldn't they have a say and some sort of agency over their local culture?

avar 4y ago

As an Icelander, our traditional culture has already been completely marginalized and destroyed by the outlawing of piracy, as well as of raping and pillaging. If the rest of the world would agree to look the other way on those topics, I'm sure we could be persuaded to once again accept double-digit percentages of the population as sla..., ahem, immigrants every year.

kerpotgh 4y ago

It depends, if it’s slow enough you’ll end up with a hybrid culture that has parts of both.

hnbad 4y ago

Why is that a problem? Languages and culture change all the time. Iceland is hardly "Iceland" anymore compared to any sufficiently past "Iceland" (e.g. pre-Internet, pre-aviation, pre-motor vehicles, etc) but I don't see any reason why that is a bad thing in principle. This seems an odd concern to be raised in a language that can charitably be described as the bastard child of Norse and French mostly spoken by people who never sat foot in Great Britain. You also seem to assume all of those immigrants are culturally and language-wise homogeneous, which is unlikely to be the case unless, say, something catastrophic happens to Canada causing its population to flee to neighboring countries (and even then that's a bad example because Canada is heterogeneous itself).