That would be logical, if wrongheaded, but it’s not accurate. The Muslim and African “migrants” in France, Britain, and Germany are far from compliant and in fact are destructive.
I think they vote for the most leftist party, as they are the ones least likely to hold them accountable for their actions (e.g., rapes, sexual assault, riots).
Less compliant in a chaotic, random manner perhaps but other than creating disorder and decay not very effective at directed change. A useful tool in creating the conditions for Anarcho-tyranny and justifying the excessive kindnesses of the (universalist) managerial state.
Maybe it's easy to keep up a pretence when all your friends are doing it. One thing I notice about young progressives is that they seem to enjoy roleplaying. When they're in groups together they talk with little lilts of the voice and affected accents and name drops etc. Even the scene's straight men do it. It's as if they're all performing in a fashion documentary. It's what I imagine Andy Warhol's social group was like. I also notice that they HATE when you question their personas. Like if they give a lilting voice/name drop and you sort of raise your eyebrow at them then they get bitter and sour. I think the roleplay thing only works if everyone is doing it. If you question it then it's like farting at an orgy: ruins the mood. Basically young progressives have a sort of Don't Ask, Don't Tell culture. Except it's about the believability of their absurd fashion/drag personas rather than about being gay.
On a personal note I find it quite distressing to talk to people like this. It feels like talking to someone who's wearing a Halloween costume and who refuses to break character. It's unsettling.
Agreed. To be it just feels like proximity to a performative madness or even a genuine delusional. Prolonged proximity to madness can only inspire more madness.
The reason Iceland gets a pass here may be that it's a small, obscure, walled-off geopolitical entity.
The same ethnocultural-preservationist sympathy ("the native culture is at risk from outsiders") would not likely be forthcoming, in the New York Times, to some region of a major Western European country with the same scale of population/problem (as Steve Sailer points out).
Iceland reverting to what it was in the 2000s (let's say, an ethnostate) would not be perceived to cause a cascade elsewhere in the White world. Whereas events on the ground in Western Europe could.
See here for my idea that the criticism of tourists may represent a veiled way to criticize the ever-larger presence of foreign residents even in small, obscure Iceland:
Iceland is wonderful. My wife and I drove the Golden Circle by ourselves (no tour bus for us, thanks) a few years ago; for me, that drive even topped Big Sur. Iceland makes you feel like you’ve truly traveled.
As to the question - because if mass immigration is bad, their concept of human nature is false?
> The good thing about the tourists is that they go home. The immigrants, on the other hand, stay to throw a spanner in the works forever. <
Well done. You beat me to it, QV.
That's the key thing, tourists *go home*. And--if you have a competent bureaucracy--you can even set you taxes (visas, air tickets, hotels, etc.) to restrict the flow to what you find desirable and raise funds to offset the costs.
Immigrants on the other are--baring serious and unpleasant (but necessary) work--are forever. At best more or less compatible and simply taking space from your own people forever. But mostly for the West, not just disrupting social cohesion but creating crime, disorder and direct costs--i.e. tax eating--forever. They are a toxic pathogen, that you are never allowed to kick.
By my calculation, several percent of the people present in Iceland at any given time in the 2020s are "unassimilable non-Western elements." They have somehow gotten in. Heavily based on cheap-foreign labor but there are also signs of bridgeheads of the usual Western-Europe-style Refugees-Welcome Migrants.
(A Sailer-type question: "Why were there 771 Syrians in Iceland in 2021?" As counted on their census. Iceland's small. Those Syrians reached 0.25% of the population, within a mere five or six years. Up from 0.00% before 2015. We can only hope that Iceland isn't stupid enough to allow legalized U.S.-style chain-migration.)
A "sealed-off" place like Iceland, too, it wouldn't be hard to overwhelm them even with similar people. The problem, however, is quite shallow and recent. Any adult Icelander today has memories of Iceland-as-ethnostate of the recent past. Even up to the late 2000s.
"Why is the global establishment so mentally unbalanced on the topic of immigration policy?"
They're not. They evaluate Icelandic phenomena in terms of the interests of the people who live in Iceland. They evaluate phenomena in other parts of the World -- UK, USA, Germany, France ... from the point of view of the people who intend to occupy those nations, robbing, raping and murdering their current inhabitants. It's called "War ", and we're losing.
> Why is the global establishment so mentally unbalanced on the topic of immigration policy? <
60 years of intense anti-white, anti-national propaganda flowing forth from the "American" media and academy, which has dominated the West since the War. And which dovetails perfectly with the needs of the super-state--and the interests of the super-state political parties. ("Diversity is the health of the state.")
All this intense propaganda has essentially created a bunch of people with a new religious ideology, that allows a whole bunch of people to feel virtuous--to know they are "good people"--simply by believing a whole set of--false and frankly ridiculous--ideas. For these people someone asserting that say Germany belongs to Germans and should be run in their interests--and worse that Germans are *better* than the immivaders--is spewing heresy, evil and committing the gravest mortal sin "racism".
Biggest mystery I’ve ever seen Steve. At least Trump just told the UN that the open borders experiment has failed and must end. NYT must be livid for all the irrational reasons possible.
Theoretically, immigrants are trying to integrate wholly into the host country and be one of them. In reality this is unlikely to happen, but that's why it's worse to criticize them in theory.
There's an interesting dovetail here with your previous post Steve.
If you ask the Amy X Wang types what they want to do, what makes their life exciting--while they are *not* marrying and having children with the incels they loathe for having the temerity to think critically about why they are frozen out--a top item will be "travel".
That means going to the "hot"/"exciting" places they--and everyone else--have heard about and taking pictures of themselves for their Instagram.
Of course, this isn't *just* young women, it's also old women, men, couples. "Travel" is more and more the filler for empty lives. Lives of people who do not have the previously normal passel of children and grandchildren filling up their lives.
~~
I confess, after each trip I've taken in the smartphone age, I'm less and less excited about travelling--especially to see X, Y or Z. More and more, for any travel I'd mostly just like to be able to briefly enjoy somewhere with mountains and lakes--away from the maddening crowds. And more and more just feel like a cold beer on the back deck, as I await the as-yet-nonexistent grandchildren.
"after each trip I've taken in the smartphone age"
Should this be read as a comment against smartphones or the technological parallel-reality ecosystem of such things as Instagram, and really the whole streamlining of much of what "travel" is in the Internet age? You dropped in the word "smartphone age" but didn't follow up on the idea (as you could've written "in the past ten years" or something, but chose "smartphone age")!
You’ve hit it on the head. Once the thrill of being dog parents wears off, it’s off to Expedia. One of my four kids is this way. Still very young, and still talks about having a family in the future, but definitely the kid I worry about the most.
There will be a reaction to all this, I’m sure; a return to “authenticity” but it’s hard to see how that will emerge. Perhaps, like Steve’s beloved punk/new wave music scene of the 70s/80s, once enough normal people get into it, the allure will be over.
Tourism to the other small I country, Ireland, is off dramatically this year.
Its funny to read a front-page story in the Irish papers about a Trump-driven decline in tourism to the US and then turning the page to see a worried reflection on the double-digit decline in Irish tourism month over month.
The young in the UK can't afford houses, and are still living in one room of a shared house at 30, but they all seem to know Thailand, Bali and Laos - or at least their beaches and bars.
"In 2024, Iceland received about 2.3 million foreign overnight visitors, up from fewer than 500,000 in 2010."
We can assume this means "2.3 million unique-individual foreigners who spent at least one night in Iceland in calendar-year 2024." Most will surely have spent multiple days/nights in Iceland, not just a single overnight. Often something more like a week, I'd guess. Who would go to Iceland and leave the next day??
We can derive a "person-days" calculation by multiplying the 2.3m figure by the number of days/nights, to get a sense of scale of this problem, compared to Iceland's ballooning resident-foreigner population.
A google-search suggests the average for a tourist visiting Iceland may spent about 8 days, 7 nights there. With that multiplier, foreign visitors will have spent 18.5m person-days in the country. That's above 50,000 foreign-tourists present on any given day. And, if there is a high-peak season, I suppose it could be twice that, at times.)
Applying this to the wider demographics of the island, we get this picture of the number of people physically in Iceland an average day in 2024 (based in part on data in wikipedia "Demographics of Iceland" page):
.
[Icelanders]
- 255,000?: Citizens of Icelandic origin (assuming 15% of Icelanders are away (out of Iceland) at any given time, given a base of 300,000 citizens).
.
[Non-Icelanders]
(Note: there were 82,000 registered foreign residents in 2024, but many may not always be in Iceland physically all 365 days a year. I've applied some deflating multipliers, as I did with Icelandic-citizens, and divided them into categories of ethnocultural-closeness or "assimilability")
- 15,000?: Foreigners of basically-completely-assimilable stock, IF present in modest numbers (mostly Scandinavians; and others of NW-European origin);
- 25,000?: Foreigners of less-assimilable stock;
- 17,500?: Foreigners of definitely NON-assimilable stock (Asia, Mid-East, Africa);
- 50,000+: Tourists, i.e., foreign short-term visitors (18.5m person-days/365) (potentially 75,000+ at high-periods, if applicable, possibly peaking 100,000 at times?).
.
[TOTAL PRESENT IN ICELAND ON A GIVEN DAY, 2024]
- 362,500: All types (subject to the multipliers I've applied).
--- of which, 70% Icelandic-origin citizens;
--- of which, 4% foreign residents of high/full assimilability;
--- of which, 7% foreign residents of mid-low practical assimilability;
--- of which, 5% definitely-unassimilable resident-element (e.g., Mid-East, India, Southeast Asians, any Africans, etc.)
--- of which, short-term foreign tourists: 14%.
At peak-visiting periods, the short-term foreign tourists likely exceeded 20% of the number of people on the island.
.
The "mid-low assimilability" and "unassimilable" elements together were probably more the short-term foreign-tourist element, much of the time. They are definitely on the same order of magnitude.
As other commenters here have noted, the resident-foreigners are a different type, by merit of not leaving (or of repeatedly coming back, to the extent they do make home-visits or go elsewhere for any reason; many of the 22,500 Polish resident-foreigners in Iceland I assume are back in Poland for portions of the year).
The tourist argument about damage to a local culture. It's usually seen in places like, say, Bhutan or possibly Bali. Iceland is small-and-obscure enough that a White host-population gets the same sympathetic ear here. But maybe more relevantly, it's possibly here a way to indirectly point to the foreigner element.
As Steve says, the two are a very-similar kind of argument; and, as commenters say, the resident-foreigner element is worse (more challenging). There remains a taboo in the West against talking too directly about a core national-titular ethnocultural-stock needing to maintain primacy in its own country (except Israel/Palestine).
The "global establishment", including NYT writers, can see the cons as well as the pros of mass tourism because they don't want to deal with huge crowds of prole tourists when they visit Venice. The third world immigrants don't live by NYT journalists, but do live close enough to the blue collar whites they despise to make life miserable for them, which is of course the whole point of mass immigration !
OT, but did anyone else see the video of the subcontinentals deplaning en-masse from the plane awaiting departure at San Francisco about 30 seconds after Trump announced the 100,000 fee on H1b visas?
Hilarious, and proof that economic tools can absolutely work.
Iceland itself doesn't take or receive that many immigrants. Even though in recent years, Reykjavík picked up its first mosque.
In contrast, there are parts of both Spain and Italy that are both tourist havens and full of immigrants. Yet, the official complaining only goes one way.
Your idea of Iceland as immigrant-free I think is outdated, but was certainly true in the 2000s and into the 2010s. By the mid-2020s, the average daily population in Iceland is probably below 70% Icelandic:
Totally unassimilable (non-European) registered foreign-residents are at something like 7%, largely foreign service-workers but some of the usual miscellaneous Migrant/Refugee type.
As a Florida native I can certainly sympathize with the Icelanders. At least they don't have the homeless gravitating to the place because you won't freeze to death if you pass out in the bushes. Florida famously has no income tax being funded by sales taxes. I like Ron DeSantis, I voted for him twice. But I think the enthusiasm for his plans to eliminate property taxes is misguided. Even if homesteaded property taxes are capped at $1000 per year, that lost revenue to the counties will have to be made up somehow. Probably in county sales tax increases. Iceland's financial boon from tourism is hard to give up. As hard as it is to go cold turkey on the money the tourists bring in, it's even harder to convince all one's neighbors to do likewise. In Florida we say that the best thing about tourists is that they eventually leave. The Icelanders should count their blessings. I don't think they appreciate just how quickly tourism can dry up complelely due to an economic downturn or international crisis.
The NY Times is as usual pandering to its peculiar readership. The over-tourism story affords a pleasurable frisson of trivial fashionable guilt to those who have visited Iceland or plan to. They won't really regret visiting or hold back from going, just feel good about themselves for being concerned.
Well, if you want a more compliant population, you'll have to import it. That's why certain people go insane at the idea of reducing immigration.
That would be logical, if wrongheaded, but it’s not accurate. The Muslim and African “migrants” in France, Britain, and Germany are far from compliant and in fact are destructive.
Well exactly
The importeers want the destruction. The natives weren't doing it fast enough on their own.
But for whom do they vote?
I think they vote for the most leftist party, as they are the ones least likely to hold them accountable for their actions (e.g., rapes, sexual assault, riots).
I agree. Hence the toleration of the negatives associated with them.
The larger percentage of a population that is non-native, the less complient it is.
Yes, indeed!
Less compliant in a chaotic, random manner perhaps but other than creating disorder and decay not very effective at directed change. A useful tool in creating the conditions for Anarcho-tyranny and justifying the excessive kindnesses of the (universalist) managerial state.
I suppose for journalists, admitting that immigration is excessive would be admitting that they've been wrong. That's hard to do!
Surely it's far harder to keep up the literally insane pretence
Maybe it's easy to keep up a pretence when all your friends are doing it. One thing I notice about young progressives is that they seem to enjoy roleplaying. When they're in groups together they talk with little lilts of the voice and affected accents and name drops etc. Even the scene's straight men do it. It's as if they're all performing in a fashion documentary. It's what I imagine Andy Warhol's social group was like. I also notice that they HATE when you question their personas. Like if they give a lilting voice/name drop and you sort of raise your eyebrow at them then they get bitter and sour. I think the roleplay thing only works if everyone is doing it. If you question it then it's like farting at an orgy: ruins the mood. Basically young progressives have a sort of Don't Ask, Don't Tell culture. Except it's about the believability of their absurd fashion/drag personas rather than about being gay.
On a personal note I find it quite distressing to talk to people like this. It feels like talking to someone who's wearing a Halloween costume and who refuses to break character. It's unsettling.
Agreed. To be it just feels like proximity to a performative madness or even a genuine delusional. Prolonged proximity to madness can only inspire more madness.
Everyone has a right to live near White people except White people.
But White people have a right to reject White visitors.
The reason Iceland gets a pass here may be that it's a small, obscure, walled-off geopolitical entity.
The same ethnocultural-preservationist sympathy ("the native culture is at risk from outsiders") would not likely be forthcoming, in the New York Times, to some region of a major Western European country with the same scale of population/problem (as Steve Sailer points out).
Iceland reverting to what it was in the 2000s (let's say, an ethnostate) would not be perceived to cause a cascade elsewhere in the White world. Whereas events on the ground in Western Europe could.
See here for my idea that the criticism of tourists may represent a veiled way to criticize the ever-larger presence of foreign residents even in small, obscure Iceland:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/q-too-many-tourists-in-iceland/comment/159321062
Iceland is wonderful. My wife and I drove the Golden Circle by ourselves (no tour bus for us, thanks) a few years ago; for me, that drive even topped Big Sur. Iceland makes you feel like you’ve truly traveled.
As to the question - because if mass immigration is bad, their concept of human nature is false?
The good thing about the tourists is that they go home. The immigrants, on the other hand, stay to throw a spanner in the works forever.
> The good thing about the tourists is that they go home. The immigrants, on the other hand, stay to throw a spanner in the works forever. <
Well done. You beat me to it, QV.
That's the key thing, tourists *go home*. And--if you have a competent bureaucracy--you can even set you taxes (visas, air tickets, hotels, etc.) to restrict the flow to what you find desirable and raise funds to offset the costs.
Immigrants on the other are--baring serious and unpleasant (but necessary) work--are forever. At best more or less compatible and simply taking space from your own people forever. But mostly for the West, not just disrupting social cohesion but creating crime, disorder and direct costs--i.e. tax eating--forever. They are a toxic pathogen, that you are never allowed to kick.
By my calculation, several percent of the people present in Iceland at any given time in the 2020s are "unassimilable non-Western elements." They have somehow gotten in. Heavily based on cheap-foreign labor but there are also signs of bridgeheads of the usual Western-Europe-style Refugees-Welcome Migrants.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/q-too-many-tourists-in-iceland/comment/159321062
(A Sailer-type question: "Why were there 771 Syrians in Iceland in 2021?" As counted on their census. Iceland's small. Those Syrians reached 0.25% of the population, within a mere five or six years. Up from 0.00% before 2015. We can only hope that Iceland isn't stupid enough to allow legalized U.S.-style chain-migration.)
A "sealed-off" place like Iceland, too, it wouldn't be hard to overwhelm them even with similar people. The problem, however, is quite shallow and recent. Any adult Icelander today has memories of Iceland-as-ethnostate of the recent past. Even up to the late 2000s.
"Why is the global establishment so mentally unbalanced on the topic of immigration policy?"
They're not. They evaluate Icelandic phenomena in terms of the interests of the people who live in Iceland. They evaluate phenomena in other parts of the World -- UK, USA, Germany, France ... from the point of view of the people who intend to occupy those nations, robbing, raping and murdering their current inhabitants. It's called "War ", and we're losing.
How are they losing? The misery they've inflicted is incalculable
> Why is the global establishment so mentally unbalanced on the topic of immigration policy? <
60 years of intense anti-white, anti-national propaganda flowing forth from the "American" media and academy, which has dominated the West since the War. And which dovetails perfectly with the needs of the super-state--and the interests of the super-state political parties. ("Diversity is the health of the state.")
All this intense propaganda has essentially created a bunch of people with a new religious ideology, that allows a whole bunch of people to feel virtuous--to know they are "good people"--simply by believing a whole set of--false and frankly ridiculous--ideas. For these people someone asserting that say Germany belongs to Germans and should be run in their interests--and worse that Germans are *better* than the immivaders--is spewing heresy, evil and committing the gravest mortal sin "racism".
Biggest mystery I’ve ever seen Steve. At least Trump just told the UN that the open borders experiment has failed and must end. NYT must be livid for all the irrational reasons possible.
Trump 2.0 is scaring them. The BBC article on his UN speech was ominously titled:
"Six years ago Trump's UN audience laughed, this year they were silent"
As hapless boss Michael Scott says in The Office tv show: "I want people to laugh when they see me coming and applaud when I go away."
Theoretically, immigrants are trying to integrate wholly into the host country and be one of them. In reality this is unlikely to happen, but that's why it's worse to criticize them in theory.
There's an interesting dovetail here with your previous post Steve.
If you ask the Amy X Wang types what they want to do, what makes their life exciting--while they are *not* marrying and having children with the incels they loathe for having the temerity to think critically about why they are frozen out--a top item will be "travel".
That means going to the "hot"/"exciting" places they--and everyone else--have heard about and taking pictures of themselves for their Instagram.
Of course, this isn't *just* young women, it's also old women, men, couples. "Travel" is more and more the filler for empty lives. Lives of people who do not have the previously normal passel of children and grandchildren filling up their lives.
~~
I confess, after each trip I've taken in the smartphone age, I'm less and less excited about travelling--especially to see X, Y or Z. More and more, for any travel I'd mostly just like to be able to briefly enjoy somewhere with mountains and lakes--away from the maddening crowds. And more and more just feel like a cold beer on the back deck, as I await the as-yet-nonexistent grandchildren.
"after each trip I've taken in the smartphone age"
Should this be read as a comment against smartphones or the technological parallel-reality ecosystem of such things as Instagram, and really the whole streamlining of much of what "travel" is in the Internet age? You dropped in the word "smartphone age" but didn't follow up on the idea (as you could've written "in the past ten years" or something, but chose "smartphone age")!
You’ve hit it on the head. Once the thrill of being dog parents wears off, it’s off to Expedia. One of my four kids is this way. Still very young, and still talks about having a family in the future, but definitely the kid I worry about the most.
There will be a reaction to all this, I’m sure; a return to “authenticity” but it’s hard to see how that will emerge. Perhaps, like Steve’s beloved punk/new wave music scene of the 70s/80s, once enough normal people get into it, the allure will be over.
Tourism to the other small I country, Ireland, is off dramatically this year.
Its funny to read a front-page story in the Irish papers about a Trump-driven decline in tourism to the US and then turning the page to see a worried reflection on the double-digit decline in Irish tourism month over month.
The young in the UK can't afford houses, and are still living in one room of a shared house at 30, but they all seem to know Thailand, Bali and Laos - or at least their beaches and bars.
"In 2024, Iceland received about 2.3 million foreign overnight visitors, up from fewer than 500,000 in 2010."
We can assume this means "2.3 million unique-individual foreigners who spent at least one night in Iceland in calendar-year 2024." Most will surely have spent multiple days/nights in Iceland, not just a single overnight. Often something more like a week, I'd guess. Who would go to Iceland and leave the next day??
We can derive a "person-days" calculation by multiplying the 2.3m figure by the number of days/nights, to get a sense of scale of this problem, compared to Iceland's ballooning resident-foreigner population.
A google-search suggests the average for a tourist visiting Iceland may spent about 8 days, 7 nights there. With that multiplier, foreign visitors will have spent 18.5m person-days in the country. That's above 50,000 foreign-tourists present on any given day. And, if there is a high-peak season, I suppose it could be twice that, at times.)
Applying this to the wider demographics of the island, we get this picture of the number of people physically in Iceland an average day in 2024 (based in part on data in wikipedia "Demographics of Iceland" page):
.
[Icelanders]
- 255,000?: Citizens of Icelandic origin (assuming 15% of Icelanders are away (out of Iceland) at any given time, given a base of 300,000 citizens).
.
[Non-Icelanders]
(Note: there were 82,000 registered foreign residents in 2024, but many may not always be in Iceland physically all 365 days a year. I've applied some deflating multipliers, as I did with Icelandic-citizens, and divided them into categories of ethnocultural-closeness or "assimilability")
- 15,000?: Foreigners of basically-completely-assimilable stock, IF present in modest numbers (mostly Scandinavians; and others of NW-European origin);
- 25,000?: Foreigners of less-assimilable stock;
- 17,500?: Foreigners of definitely NON-assimilable stock (Asia, Mid-East, Africa);
- 50,000+: Tourists, i.e., foreign short-term visitors (18.5m person-days/365) (potentially 75,000+ at high-periods, if applicable, possibly peaking 100,000 at times?).
.
[TOTAL PRESENT IN ICELAND ON A GIVEN DAY, 2024]
- 362,500: All types (subject to the multipliers I've applied).
--- of which, 70% Icelandic-origin citizens;
--- of which, 4% foreign residents of high/full assimilability;
--- of which, 7% foreign residents of mid-low practical assimilability;
--- of which, 5% definitely-unassimilable resident-element (e.g., Mid-East, India, Southeast Asians, any Africans, etc.)
--- of which, short-term foreign tourists: 14%.
At peak-visiting periods, the short-term foreign tourists likely exceeded 20% of the number of people on the island.
.
The "mid-low assimilability" and "unassimilable" elements together were probably more the short-term foreign-tourist element, much of the time. They are definitely on the same order of magnitude.
As other commenters here have noted, the resident-foreigners are a different type, by merit of not leaving (or of repeatedly coming back, to the extent they do make home-visits or go elsewhere for any reason; many of the 22,500 Polish resident-foreigners in Iceland I assume are back in Poland for portions of the year).
The tourist argument about damage to a local culture. It's usually seen in places like, say, Bhutan or possibly Bali. Iceland is small-and-obscure enough that a White host-population gets the same sympathetic ear here. But maybe more relevantly, it's possibly here a way to indirectly point to the foreigner element.
As Steve says, the two are a very-similar kind of argument; and, as commenters say, the resident-foreigner element is worse (more challenging). There remains a taboo in the West against talking too directly about a core national-titular ethnocultural-stock needing to maintain primacy in its own country (except Israel/Palestine).
I'd imagine 85% of Iceland's Tourists come in May thru September.
Not a lot of hours of daylight in December.
82,000 foreign residents to 300,000 Icelanders is a huge number.
The "global establishment", including NYT writers, can see the cons as well as the pros of mass tourism because they don't want to deal with huge crowds of prole tourists when they visit Venice. The third world immigrants don't live by NYT journalists, but do live close enough to the blue collar whites they despise to make life miserable for them, which is of course the whole point of mass immigration !
OT, but did anyone else see the video of the subcontinentals deplaning en-masse from the plane awaiting departure at San Francisco about 30 seconds after Trump announced the 100,000 fee on H1b visas?
Hilarious, and proof that economic tools can absolutely work.
But it gets better.
Iceland itself doesn't take or receive that many immigrants. Even though in recent years, Reykjavík picked up its first mosque.
In contrast, there are parts of both Spain and Italy that are both tourist havens and full of immigrants. Yet, the official complaining only goes one way.
Your idea of Iceland as immigrant-free I think is outdated, but was certainly true in the 2000s and into the 2010s. By the mid-2020s, the average daily population in Iceland is probably below 70% Icelandic:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/q-too-many-tourists-in-iceland/comment/159321062
Totally unassimilable (non-European) registered foreign-residents are at something like 7%, largely foreign service-workers but some of the usual miscellaneous Migrant/Refugee type.
As a Florida native I can certainly sympathize with the Icelanders. At least they don't have the homeless gravitating to the place because you won't freeze to death if you pass out in the bushes. Florida famously has no income tax being funded by sales taxes. I like Ron DeSantis, I voted for him twice. But I think the enthusiasm for his plans to eliminate property taxes is misguided. Even if homesteaded property taxes are capped at $1000 per year, that lost revenue to the counties will have to be made up somehow. Probably in county sales tax increases. Iceland's financial boon from tourism is hard to give up. As hard as it is to go cold turkey on the money the tourists bring in, it's even harder to convince all one's neighbors to do likewise. In Florida we say that the best thing about tourists is that they eventually leave. The Icelanders should count their blessings. I don't think they appreciate just how quickly tourism can dry up complelely due to an economic downturn or international crisis.
The NY Times is as usual pandering to its peculiar readership. The over-tourism story affords a pleasurable frisson of trivial fashionable guilt to those who have visited Iceland or plan to. They won't really regret visiting or hold back from going, just feel good about themselves for being concerned.