Authors

Discussion

Icelandic tourism industry is characterised by a large proportion of migrant workforce compared with the local population — in 2024, 44% of employees working in the sector were from an immigrant background, constituting around 14,000 individuals. This ratio has been increasing year by year, and a growing number of foreigners are employed to cater for visitors in a landscape dominated by nature tourism and its infrastructure. Since the opening of the Icelandic market to foreign contractors in the 1980s, Poles have established themselves as the largest migrant community in the country, easing the way for subsequent generations to come and find employment on the island. Many of these young migrants seek jobs in tourism, and according to data from 2019, Poles were the largest group employed in the sector outside of Icelanders. 

The current shape of the Icelandic tourism job market is marked by demand-driven work arrangements, high labour turnover, substandard employment, and fluctuating demand for the labour force. The seasonal and booming Icelandic tourism industry necessitates filling labour shortages with migrant workers, and flexible and insecure forms of employment are utilised to address these dynamics. This arrangement generates labour (im)mobility: the emergence and termination of work opportunities for foreigners, and periods of work and non-work dictated by the transience of labour under late capitalism. 

This presentation will address the affective infrastructures of labour (im)mobilities of young Poles working in Icelandic tourism. Basing my findings on two months of anthropological fieldwork I conducted in Iceland in the summer of 2024, I will show how migrant infrastructures influence and shape people’s imaginaries that define their work in local tourism. I will point to everyday moments in which workers’ mobility projects are enacted and acted upon following the parameters of their respective imaginaries. These moments will be revealed across geographies and temporalities, pointing to different scales and their respective infrastructures ordering workers’ mobility, such as border policies, communication and transport, as well as digital migrant infrastructures and their affective potential.