Icelander’s Immigration Tolerance Increasing

A new Gallup world survey, reported by Fréttablaðið this morning, has shown that Icelanders’ tolerance of immigrants is increasing. The survey gives countries up to a maxim score of 9.0, with Iceland’s increasing from 8.26 to 8.41 since the last survey in 2016. However, Iceland has lost the top spot to Canada, which scored 8.46 – in the 2016 survey, the top spot was Iceland’s.

Other top countries included New Zealand, the United States, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, and Burkina Faso. North Macedonia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia were the least accepting countries, and the survey revealed that as a whole, the world’s tolerance of immigration is actually decreasing.

Rakel Ósk Reynisdóttir, the multicultural representative of the University of Iceland, says that it is not surprising that younger, more educated and more urban people have been revealed to be the most tolerant.

“It is generally seen that people who travel more become more open-minded,” she said, adding that she has been pleasantly surprised by how many applications she received to work in a recent project with immigrants in Iceland, for example, and also praised the fact that unlike in other European countries, large right-wing populist parties fighting against immigrants have never risen to power in Iceland. “We do not vote for those parties because we do not believe in those views.”

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