High immigration numbers are fine for countries like the USA. But for many small countries it's a death sentence.

Why? And do you mean small geographically or small population-wise? Perhaps both/neither?

Population wise. Imagine 500k immigrants a year. It would be nothing for a country like India. But it would be a death sentence for Iceland.

Death sentence in that you envision the services and economy can’t handle that many new immigrants?

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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/mannfj...

2. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

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.

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".

Yes none of this required immigration but that's besides the point when we're talking about a country absorbing immigrants.

> If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls.

Following this extreme reasoning we should equally just dissolve all borders. Let's start with Japan or Switzerland perhaps? I've always thought it would be cool to live in Switzerland myself. I'm disappointed I can't retire to the Scottish countryside or to Brittany. Who are they to tell me I can't live there?

Obviously this is a non-starter, but being dismissive of others wanting to hold on to their contemporary culture is ridiculous too.

>No culture is static,

indeed, the dodo would agree

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?

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.

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).

Considering that Iceland has a population of less than 400k, more than doubling the population over a 12-month period in the cold would be a death sentence not just the the country, but for all the new immigrants that are moving there.

> US has mostly solved our population aging problem with having fairly open immigration and high immigration numbers relative to the rest of the developed/rich world

I'm not sure about that. For starters, it's easier to immigrate to Germany or the UK than to the US, and by percentage of the population, Germany does host a higher number of immigrants.

The US does accept more foreigners yearly, but it makes it a long way, if any, to stay in the country permanently.

A key difference is jus soli citizenship in the Americas, if you're born here you're a citizen

Yup, we don't have permanent citizen sub-classes like Koreans in Japan who end up being neither Korean nor Japanese even multiple generations in.

Skills. The US hoovers up the world’s skilled immigrants. Germany - like much of the non-english speaking world is left with the scraps.

Don’t take it from me, look at what the German government is doing with allowing foreigners to immigrate there. When a country throws open its doors the way Germany has, you must ask the question - why?

Population crash, that's why. You can choose not to have kids but enterprises cannot choose to not have employees. People can be taught new skills.

Maybe legally but we literally have millions of people that come here to work every year and are not documented. Nearly 3 million last year and although there are many refugees that are here for help, it's mainly people that want to work in everything from kitchens, the landscaping, to construction, to farming, to whatever else can make use of people that want to work hard every day at a manual job and show up.

I suspect EU country vs US comparisons get thrown off as well by EU freedom of movement vs US interstate mobility. We should probably be looking at aggregate EU immigration from non-EU nations when comparing to other developed countries.

Someone born in France but lives in Germany vs someone born in New York but lives in California are both similarly easy from a legal standpoint. However counting the Frenchman in Germany as an immigrant seems kind of dubious given that's kind of the point of the EU.

That's only true if you are educated and from the west. Otherwise, it's much harder to legally (or illegally) immigrate to germany. The USA is a lot more open to immigrants, and in my experience, there is more xenophobia/racism towards non-western immigrants in germany.

I'm not comparing Germany to the US from a societal standpoint, but their legal immigration frameworks.

For instance, the US has immigration quotas for pretty much everything, thus the backlogs that resulted in Chinese and Indian born people to wait for a decade or more to achieve their permanent residency status. The process is also extremely complex and, as a result of that, it is quite expensive, in the order of thousands of dollars.