Does Icelandic government pay foreign men to marry local women? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Rumours online claim that the Icelandic government is willing to pay immigrant males a hefty sum of money for migrating to Iceland and marrying an Icelandic female, due to the country being significantly overpopulated with females.

FALSE

The amount of money given to immigrants for marrying an Icelandic women varies depending on which variation of the hoax you happen across, but one of the most popular versions quotes $5000 per month.

Regardless of which version you see, it’s false. The fake claim began spreading online in 2016 when a viral story published by a website called The Spirit Whispers spread through social media. That story – like many others published by that site – was fake clickbait designed to fool readers into sharing it’s content. It wasn’t based on truth.


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Despite that, the story is often picked up by aggregator websites or republished in blogs by mistake, meaning the hoax has never really gone away. So prolific was the rumour that The Reykjavik Grapevine reported that Icelandic women were reporting being spammed by friend requests from foreign men.

We reached out to the Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs who told us –

There is absolutely no truth to this rumor, this is a hoax.

…As well as pointing us to this link from the Iceland Monitor.

As for the significant lack of men in the country, this is also a hoax. Iceland – unlike many other countries – regularly produces a number of detailed reports about its relatively small population. In the first quarter of 2019, the country actually had more men than women. The males outnumbered the females 183,920 to 174,860.

So not only does the Icelandic government not pay immigrant males to marry Icelandic females, there are actually more men in the country than women. As such the rumours are entirely false.

 

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