Hacker News Reader

Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Iceland is barely a medium sized US city. Norway has fewer people than Massachusetts. It’s difficult to make any comparison at all between Scandinavian countries and the US in any lens given their lack of immigration and fairly uniform race and culture.

Doesn’t stop a lot of people here from trying, however.

View on HN

Lack of immigration? Where did you get that from? Iceland had quite a high rate of immigration. In Sweden, 30% are either foreign born or have foreign born parents, with the largest immigrant group being from Asia.

There were over 200k recorded immigrants in November 2022 alone. That doesn’t include the ones that weren’t caught.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/13/monthly-e...

Nearly the entirely population of Iceland came to the US in a single month. The scale of immigration here is very hard to compare with anything the EU sees.

Absolute numbers tell me absolutely nothing. What matters is per capita. But if we're going to go by absolute numbers... Sweden had over 100-200k immigrants per year several years. That's over 1% of the population in just a year. Sweden has a higher rate of foreign born people than the US.

The US has a population of ~330 million. Iceland has a population of ~390,000. Iceland is 102k km², but only about a quarter of that is habitable due to glaciers, mountains, and nature reserved. It's comparable in size to Vermont or Massachusetts.

17k people migrated to Iceland last year, or about 4.3% of the total population.

The United States 200k is about 0.06% of the population.

Have you been to Iceland? There's loads of non-Icelandic people living there. About 16.3% of the entire country's population[1], and in some areas it's close to 30%.[2]

The highest number of immigrants in the US are in CA, where it's ~23%,[3], and the country average is about 14%.[4] Although this number is no doubt higher in some cities like SF and LA. But as a country, Iceland has roughly the same or more immigrants than the US.

[1]: https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2022...

[2]: https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2021/10/20/immigrant...

[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/immigrants-in-california/

[4]: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...

For the US the parent said it was 200k migrants in one month. That's 2.4 million/year, or 0.7% of the population.

Whoops, too late to edit now – but the point is still the same.

> The scale of immigration here is very hard to compare with anything the EU sees.

It's not. Lots of European countries have comparable or greater immigration rates than the US. And the EU as a whole is soaking up a huge number of Ukrainian refugees.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but nearly all the immigration to Iceland happened before 1000 CE.

That's why it's such a paradise for DNA research, and why they have websites so you can check how closely you're related to someone before marrying them -- everyone's related to everyone else, at a fairly close level.

That was true a few decades ago. Demand for tourism jobs has outstripped supply (especially in summer months) so a good number of people have come to Iceland (some temporarily, some permanently) to work. Poles are the largest group, making up about 5% of the population of Iceland: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_Iceland

Anecdotally, on a recent trip I briefly felt like there were no Icelanders in Iceland - I had a British masseuse, a Finnish horse tour guide, and a Namibian scuba guide.

Yeah Americans seem to have gotten the idea that nordic countries are completely homogenous for some reason. It's absurd how often I see them act like we can't compare our countries to the US because we apparently have no immigrants.

"Nordic countries" is an inappropriate generalization. The other ones are not islands.

People say this about both Sweden and Iceland and it's not true for either of them.

They aren't, but Scandinavia may as well be. The only land border is an icy, barely-populated taiga controlled by an extremely authoritarian, violence-happy enemy of the West. My bet is crossing that border is _significantly_ harder than the US-Mexico border

they do have a bridge to Denmark now, though.

>The only land border is an icy, barely-populated taiga controlled by an extremely authoritarian, violence-happy enemy of the West

Finland isn't that bad

In the US there are many ideas about how things work in Sweden without closely considering facts. This is often politically motivated regardless of political affiliation.

It's a mid 2000s internet trope that somewhat persists. Back when Ericsson and Nokia where cool the media would make an example of Sweden and Finland.

Every discussion would be a variation on:

- "I want $LIBERTARIAN_POLICY policy"

- "In Sweden, they have $SOCIALIST_POLICY and its better!"

- "That only works because it's small and homogeneous!"

That, or people would motte-and-bailey harder left-wing opinions behind the Sweden motte.

In most cases you have Icelanders running the tourism business, but they won't be fronting the business necessarily. That is where imported labour comes in.

The DNA check in dating is mostly a PR stunt by a local genetics research company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com