Being a desirable migrant: perception and racialisation of Icelandic migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the financial crisis that hit Iceland in October 2008, increased numbers of Icelanders migrated to Norway to seek employment due to difficult economic circumstances in Iceland. Using critical perspectives from postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, the paper explores how these Icelandic migrants in Norway make sense of their new position as economic migrants within a global economy characterised by a growing sense of precariousness, while past inequalities and racism continue to matter. We also examine how these migrants are perceived in Norwegian media, and how social discourses of Icelandic migrants reflect larger Norwegian debates on racism, desirability and cultural belonging. Media discourses in Norway and interviews with Icelandic migrants reveal a hierarchy of acceptability of migrants. Icelanders are positioned as highly desirable compared to other migrant groups due to the intersection of perceived racial belonging, nationality and class. Our discussion contributes, furthermore, towards a critical analysis of the category migrant, by exploring how the term immigrant (innvandrer/innflytjandi) is used in narratives of Icelandic migrants in Norway and in Norwegian media discussions, showing the negative and racialised connotations of the term immigrant and how its understanding is linked with vulnerable positions and discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic migrants
• racialisation
• class
• migrant desirability
• Norway

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Guðbjört Guðjónsdóttir http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7126-3452

Kristín Loftsdóttir http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3491-724X

Notes

1 Some articles that were originally collected in 2011 had readers’ comments, but when our more thorough search took place in 2014 these articles did no longer have the readers’ comments attached. One possible explanation for the small number of articles that had readers’ comment is therefore that some of the media websites did not archive readers’ comments, which is a common practice elsewhere (McCluskey and Hmielowski 2012). At least two of the news websites changed their commenting system in 2011, which may have resulted in older comments being deleted. After these changes, readers were no longer allowed to comment anonymously.

2 All quotes from Norwegian media were written in Norwegian and are translated to English by us.

3 The interviews were in Icelandic and we have translated the quotes to English. The names of the participants have been changed. When not specified, the interviewees being referred to migrated to Norway after the onset of the financial crisis.

Additional information

Funding

The research received a doctoral grant from the University of Iceland Research fund and a grant from the Memorial fund of Eðvarð Sigurðsson. The study is a part of the research project Icelandic Identity in Crisis funded by the Icelandic Centre for Research (Rannís) [grant number 130426-051], and the University of Iceland Research Fund.