Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.08.2012, Side 14

14
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 13 — 2012
Iceland | Immigration
“
I just hide in the bath-
room and cry so my kids
don’t see me. But you have
to get past it because you’re
the foreigner here. Even if
they give you a passport,
you’re still a foreigner.
You’re the outcast here.„
With Foreign Unemployment Ballooning, Some
Smell Discrimination The fight to fit into the
country and squeeze into the labour market
Words by Cory Weinberg @coryweinberg Photo by Hörður Sveinsson.
When Shanice Rogers moved from
jamaica to Iceland in 2001, she got
hooked on studying law. She’s now
29 years old with a fresh bachelor’s
degree in law from the university
of Iceland. But after a string of em-
ployment rejections in ministry of-
fices and law firms—44 “Nos” to be
exact—she thinks the country’s le-
gal system may be failing her.
“I was rejected from every last job. It be-
came a routine thing—that every day,
word would come in that I didn’t get it.
I was ranked fifteenth in my law school
class, but I can’t get a job,” says Shanice,
whose name has been changed due to
her fears of backlash from employers.
“I have never been the subject of direct
discrimination based on my race, but I
know indirectly that I have. At gradua-
tion, it was said that 90% of my peers
had gotten jobs or offers.”
Shanice has no hard evidence, no
smoking gun revealing concrete preju-
dice, but she’s done her homework. And
she may have a point. No comprehen-
sive law against employment discrimi-
nation based on race or ethnicity exists
in Iceland, making legal convention
murky for judges and foreigners.
While the Constitution of Iceland
guarantees that all shall be treated
equally under the law, regardless of
race or ethnicity, the European Council
called for stronger measures this year
to prevent employment discrimination.
Iceland’s Minister of Welfare Guðbjar-
tur Hannesson says the country is fol-
lowing suit, with The Ministry drafting
its first employment non-discrimina-
tion bill this summer following pres-
sure from the international organisa-
tion.
“Historically it can be stated that
immigration to Iceland is a fairly new
phenomenon. In the last ten years, the
amount of residents in Iceland with a
foreign background has almost doubled
and therefore matters regarding immi-
gration are receiving more attention,”
Guðbjartur says. “The Minister of Wel-
fare has put forward a bill on immi-
grant issues for Parliament and it will
hopefully be passed next autumn. This
will be the first bill aimed solely at im-
migrants.”
Immigrant song, on loop
Shanice usually applies for jobs online,
scouring for openings at offices that
may have a positive history of hiring
foreign workers, like the Ministry of
Welfare. Navigating web pages isn’t
a problem for her because she speaks
Icelandic f luently, or as f luently as a
non-native Icelander can speak. Once
she gets her master’s degree, she wants
to be a corporate lawyer or a public de-
fence attorney to work on asylum cases.
But for now, she just wants to support
her two sons, whom she has raised with
her Icelandic ex-husband.
“When I apply, I do have credentials,
but if you’re not looking at them, you
won’t see them. You see a picture of a
black girl named Shanice Rogers. If it’s
not Jóhannsdóttir, it’s onto the next ap-
plication,” she says.
And with foreign unemployment
about 15%—an increase from the last
couple years and almost back up to a lev-
el from the height of the 2008 economic
collapse—this population of workers is
one of Iceland’s most vulnerable. In a
country that spent centuries closed off
from immigration, the foreign wave is
hitting hard and fast.
Shanice says the law needs to catch
up, and she’ll say it to whoever listens.
In mid-June, she stood up at a forum for
presidential candidates at the Commu-
nity Centre in Reykjavík and told her
story. “What were the candidates going
to do to help foreigners get jobs and
move past discrimination?” she asked
President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson and
then-candidate Þóra Arnórsdóttir.
“The law doesn’t acknowledge that
there’s been a drastic change in soci-
ety where it’s no longer just born and
raised Icelanders,” Shanice says. “You
have other people moving here from
other countries and cultures. The coun-
try is now a multicultural society. For
me, I can only speak of the law, and the
legal environment doesn’t acknowledge
that.”
Gerður Gestsdóttir, a counsellor at
the Directorate of Labour who helps
unemployed immigrants find work and
get their benefits, says she’s seen more
and more people walk through her of-
fice since the country’s economic crash,
especially since a broken construction
industry wiped out jobs for tens of thou-
sands of Polish immigrants.
But she says while some who come
through her door complain of discrimi-
nation, many still land a job, some even
in important roles with big companies.
Still, she admits many don’t even have a
shot in some businesses. “You see com-
panies, now that they have a choice, pre-
fer people who speak perfect Icelandic.
Even a foreigner who spoke Icelandic
would not meet their standards,” she
says.

Making her own break
Adey Baldursdóttir, who is also not be-
ing identified by her real name for fear
of backlash from employers, has had a
tough time finding work since moving
here from Ghana in 2003. She often
walks into businesses to look for work
and tells them what she can do and asks
whether they have something for her.
“Of course, sometimes they think it’s
funny. Some of them look at me like,
‘You black African, you want to be a
manager?’ They don’t say it but their ac-
tions say it all. Then I just walk out with
my pride,” she says.
Adey finally found a job, but it’s not
the job she thinks she’s qualified for.
She cleans the clubhouse at a football
stadium near Reykjavík. On a Sunday
in mid-July, her corner office is quiet.
There are no jerseys to wash or coffee
pots to refill. She just has her class
work—a stepping-stone to the MBA
she’s trying to achieve.
After earning her teaching certifi-
cate from the University of Reykjavík,
Adey says she’s been shut out of schools
across the capital area because of her
race. Adey’s father motivated her to be-
come a teacher while she was growing
up in Ghana. She’d visit a nearby village
with children, tossing them cookies and
candy if they would sing and dance for
her. She moved to Reykjavík in 2003 af-
ter earning a teaching degree in Ghana
and marrying an Icelandic man. They
have three small children.
Before she was pregnant with her
first child, Adey worked in a fish fac-
tory, which she called a rite of passage
for Icelandic immigrants. She enjoyed
the work, trimming the fish and freez-
ing them. But her next job—a teach-
ing assistantship at a school in Haf-
narfjörður—was even better.
“Once in a while I’d go into the class-
room and teach something in English.
It was very interesting. There was one
time when I taught the whole school
African dance—the students, the teach-
ers. It was so much fun,” she says.
She adds, “The school’s headmis-
tress encouraged me to go to school and
get the Icelandic teaching certificate,
that I shouldn’t just be a teaching assis-
tant because I was a teacher in Ghana. I
took her advice and went back to school
but unfortunately right after I gradu-
ated and got my teaching certificate, the
crisis hit.”
Since then, Adey hasn’t been able to
break into a school in Reykjavík, getting
by on her husband’s income, unemploy-
ment benefits and grants. She is also
held back by her inability to speak f lu-
ent Icelandic, or write it well. She got
through school by listening to Icelandic
lectures and writing essays in English,
a plan her professors blessed. Hers is
a tale many experts say is common for
Icelandic immigrants, who stare up at
an employment ceiling that they can’t
crack because they can’t speak Icelandic
f luently.
Adey says she’s not discouraged, but
that evidence of discrimination is clear.
When she talked to an assistant princi-
pal at a nearby school, he seemed eager
to hire her despite her foreign accent.
But when she went in for an interview,
his tone and the principal’s response
was less enthusiastic when they saw she
was black.
“The next day they told me, ‘Sorry
we already hired somebody.’ It hurt, but
you just cry a little bit and get up. I don’t
let people’s attitudes Continues over
As much as it sucks to admit it, discrimination against immigrants is definitely
a reality in Iceland. Have you any experience of the subject? Why not drop us a
line? Making the problem visible is one way of tackling it. letters@grapevine.is
This photo appeared on the cover
of Issue 2 in 2004 to go along with a
feature called “Independent Women: Is
Feminism Still Necessary?” That story,
however, turned out to be more about
racism when the Reykjavík Folk-Dance
Association refused to rent us a na-
tional costume because our model was
a black woman.
To quote then editor Valur Gun-
narsson: “To counter localised ideals of
beauty, as well as to embrace the mul-
ticultural society, we decided to ask
a black woman to wear the costume.
We thought this was kinda nice. Little
did we expect the reaction. The lady
who was going to lend us the costume
withdrew her offer upon hearing of
who was to wear it. Not because she
didn´t like the person in question, or
had ever met her before, but because
she was black. We then decided to rent
a costume. The answer was the same.
We asked the woman who owned the
rental whether she would refuse a
person point blank to rent a certain
costume on the basis of her colour, to
which she replied she would.”
In the end, The Grapevine had to go
all the way to Laugarvatn and borrow a
costume from the Woman´s Associa-
tion there. When people got wind of
this, many were outraged that such
racism existed here in Iceland. Now,
we wonder how much has changed...