Women, children, and hard workers only
Review of “Women, children, and hard workers only: The regulation of forced migration in Iceland 1940–2000” by Íris Ellenberger
Leinonen, J., Tervonen, M., Frøland, H.O., Hoffmann, C., Jalagin, S., Jønsson, H.V. and Thor Tureby, M. (eds) (2025) <i>Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories</i>. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-32.
Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories, winner of the Nordic History Book Award 2025, is the first comparative study of refugee and forced migration histories across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, repositioning forced migrants as central to the making of Nordic societies; the book is available open access for free at Helsinki University Press.
I chose to review Íris Ellenberger’s chapter “Women, children, and hard workers only: The regulation of forced migration in Iceland 1940–2000” because it brings to light a neglected dimension of Icelandic history, the systematic selectivity and exclusion that defined twentieth-century refugee policy and continue to shape contemporary practices of immigration and policing.
In doing so, the chapter also unsettles and moves away from Iceland’s self-image as a humanitarian or egalitarian society, revealing instead how national interests, racialized logics, and utilitarian calculations have long structured its approach to migration.
“The only nonwhite, non-European refugees resettled in Iceland in the twentieth century were three groups of Vietnamese refugees arriving in 1979 and 1990–1991.”
Íris Ellenberger’s chapter offers a meticulous account of Iceland’s refugee and forced migration policies during the second half of the twentieth century, situating them within broader Nordic and European contexts. The central argument is that Iceland’s approach to forced migration was highly restrictive, utilitarian, and assimilationist, shaped less by humanitarian concerns than by national self-interest, racialized notions of belonging, and economic priorities.
“The hiring and selection process was marked by several factors that would characterize the resettlement of refugee groups in Iceland throughout the second half of the twentieth century. These included the preeminence of forced migrants as a labor force and an emphasis on the compatibility of these migrants with the Icelandic genetic pool and whiteness, as the contract signed by the German agricultural laborers stated that they should be 20 to 35 years of age and of Northern German origin.”
The study demonstrates how Iceland, despite its accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention, maintained one of the most tightly controlled and selective regimes of refugee reception in the region. The narrative begins with the Surveillance of Foreigners Acts of 1920 and 1936, legal frameworks that introduced systematic restrictions and placed immigration firmly under state surveillance. This groundwork, Ellenberger demonstrates, shaped Iceland’s near-total rejection of Jewish refugees before and during the Second World War, a policy motivated by nationalist fears of racial “impurity” and the eugenicist thinking of the time. This way, legal control, racialized selectivity, and the privileging of national self-interest set the contours of Iceland’s migration policy.
Categories of Refugees
A central contribution of the chapter lies in its distinction between two categories of refugees. On the one hand were groups resettled through UNHCR programs, carefully handpicked according to criteria of utility, assimilation potential, and, often implicitly, whiteness. On the other hand were individual asylum seekers who reached Iceland independently and who, despite the formal obligations of international law, were systematically denied refugee status. This bifurcation, Ellenberger argues, reveals how Icelandic authorities constructed the very definition of the refugee in ways that legitimized acceptance of the “useful” and exclusion of the unwanted.
The imposition of Icelandic names on Vietnamese children in the 1970s and 1990s exemplifies this assimilationist impulse, where humanitarian admission was conditioned upon cultural erasure and conformity.
Utilitarian and Assimilationist Logics
Ellenberger underscores how deeply a utilitarian calculus shaped Iceland’s refugee policy. Admissions were justified less on humanitarian grounds than on their perceived economic or social utility: refugees were welcomed as workers to alleviate chronic labor shortages, as women and children whose presence was considered manageable, or as instruments of regional development. The German arrivals of 1949, many of whom were themselves displaced persons, exemplify this logic. They were received first as agricultural laborers conscripted into sustaining the national economy, and second, as refugees in need of protection
Even by the late twentieth century, when Iceland began to admit refugee groups more regularly, the mindset remained the same. Resettlement was seen through the lens of self-interest, with refugee families strategically placed in rural municipalities to bolster depopulating regions, revealing how economic and demographic concerns consistently eclipsed humanitarian commitments.
Legal Lag and Democratic Deficits
Although Iceland ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention in 1956, domestic law remained misaligned for decades. The 1965 Surveillance of Foreigners Act recognized only political refugees and contained no explicit principle of non-refoulement. This disjuncture created enduring uncertainty for asylum seekers and allowed authorities to deny formal refugee status while granting only limited humanitarian permits. The establishment of the Icelandic Refugee Council in 1995 marked a modest shift, prompted largely by criticism from NGOs, left-wing politicians, and international bodies. Yet even these reforms reinforced the strong hand of the state in selecting, categorizing, and directing the trajectories of forced migrants.
The secrecy of decision-making and the absence of transparent public debate points towards a democratic deficit at the heart of Iceland’s refugee regime. Ellenberger’s chapter makes a powerful contribution to the history of forced migration in the Nordic region by exposing how Iceland’s geographical isolation allowed for an especially stringent regime of control.
Between 1956 and 2000, only 374 individuals were granted formal refugee status, a figure that speaks volumes about the state’s restrictive posture, especially when set against the scale of global conflicts during those decades.
By tracing the entanglement of nationalism, eugenics, utilitarianism, and assimilationism in Icelandic refugee policy, the chapter unsettles any perception of the country as a peripheral or benign actor in the history of forced migration.
Instead, Iceland appears as a site where sovereignty was exercised through the rigid regulation of belonging with humanitarian obligations consistently eclipsed by economic calculation and racialized ideals of cultural integrity. This nearly 85 years approach cannot be explained away by narratives of innocence, ignorance, or the supposed novelty of immigration in the island, as some social scientists have suggested.
“Eiríksson (2008) has pointed out, the project raised concerns about the mixing of foreign and Icelandic “blood,” but its supporters claimed that there was no cause for alarm since people from Northern Germany and the Nordic countries were considered to have the same (superior) racial origins.”
The chapter makes for a compelling analysis for its attention to the interplay between law, ideology, and practice. One of the chapter’s strengths is its nuanced critique of assimilationist practices, which exposes, for a person like myself, approaching this from a different discipline, how humanitarian language can be used for disciplinary and exclusionary logics.
“White women and children, […] were considered more easily assimilated into the dominant culture than men.”
However, while the discussion of legal frameworks is thorough, the perspective of refugees themselves remains less developed, likely due to source limitations, but nonetheless a gap that future oral histories are likely to address.
Overall, Ellenberger convincingly argues that between 1940 and 2000, Iceland’s refugee policy was guided less by humanitarian imperatives than by nationalism, economic utility, and the desire for strict control.
The study enriches Nordic migration historiography, political and social history, by revealing how forced migrants were not simply absent from Iceland but actively excluded, managed, and assimilated on the state’s terms.
What struck me most was the conjunction of these restrictive legal frameworks, epitomized by the Surveillance Acts, with the stark fact that the only nonwhite, non-European refugees admitted to Iceland in the entire twentieth century were three small groups of Vietnamese resettled in 1979 and 1990–1991.
This recalled for me how generalized suspicion functions as both a policing strategy and a political technology, binding racialized governance to affective regimes. A parallel can be drawn with the experience of Black U.S. G.I.s stationed at Keflavík during World War II, whose racialized masculinities were constructed as symbolic threats to the island’s social order, an association that has lingered in the contemporary cultural imagination and media circuits.
Source
Johnson, Thomas A. (1971). Bias Is Charged On G.I.’S in Iceland. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/17/archives/bias-is-charged-on-gis-in-iceland-congressman-reports-pact-limiting.html