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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
