Month: December 2009

Finland’s challenge in the new decade

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The new decade will either make or break Finland. If we are not successful at attracting labor immigrants to our country to plug the ever-growing number of pensioners leaving the labor market during the 2010s, the first one to feel the impact will be the economy.

Due to the recession and age-old taboos of Finnish nationalism, some Finns would rather stick their heads in the sand than face the demographic challenges ahead. According to Statistics Finland,Finland´s population is graying rapidly. As more people retire from the workforce the more strains it will place on public finances and our society.

How many? The number of pensioners will rise from the present 17% (905,000 persons who are older than 65 years) to 27% by 2040 and 29% (1.79 million) by 2060. Better medicare will fuel this trend. Persons over 85 years in Finland will rise from 2% (108,000) to 7% (463,000).

Any sensible person understands that for a country to have a successful and dynamic immigration policy a general acceptance by society is paramount. Does Finland have a favorable attitude towards immigrants?  The jury is still out on this question since Finland’s foreign population is still too small to make any clear assessment. However, if we look at immigrant unemployment figures, which are about two times higher than the national average, Finland does not appear very immigrant-friendly.

One of the matters that we will have overcome as a nation if we want to attract new inhabitants is offer opportunities to attain the Finnish dream.The same matters that makes us want to live here must rub off on those who may choose to move here.

Despite our successful welfare society founded on liberal democratic values, the weight of our history continues to muddy our view of the outside world and of outsiders. It has made us liberal in our perceptions of society but also extremely conservative because we have always felt that we are in danger of being devoured by a foreign power.

Knowledge of our history is vital but more important is how we see the future.

Migrant Tales says thank you!

Posted on by Migrant Tales

With year-end rapidly approaching and giving way to the new year, I would like to thank all those thousands of  bloggers who have visited Migrant Tales recently and shared their thoughts with us. Thanks you!

One of the posts that has stirred a lot of debate is Are you a victim of racism in Finland, which has close to 9,000 hits and about 1,000 comments. Other popular posts that some bloggers enjoyed were The Destroying Angel mushroom, Finnish “culture and personality” and Is there racism in Finland?

I wish everyone lots of success in 2010!

The sub-arctic is truly a fascinating place…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cW-_8LzLfc&feature=related]

Banishing the racial myths of Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

One of the matters that cultural diversity will bring to Finland is challenge the very myths and views of itself especially on the ethnic front.

Even though Finns have created a well-functioning society founded on social justice, these values have basically applied to Finns. Apart from its geographic remoteness form the rest of Europe, some Finns have emphasized in the previous century their cultural and linguistic uniqueness through the hush-hush acknowledgement of  “racial hygiene.”

A good example of this is the professor of social policy Heikki Waris, who wrote in the 1950s: “When conditions in Finland are compared with those elsewhere, for instance in central and southern European countries with their many kinds of racial mixes and all the associated unmanageable social problems, the racial unity of our nation must be seen as a great source of strength.”

Contrary to other parts of the world, “race and language” were the driving forces of our independence as well. This fear, and in many cases hatred, of the Russians even unified the Whites and Reds from the Winter War (1939-40). In the post-war period, it gained further strength through Finland’s geopolitical isolation until its full political and economic integration with Western Europe came in 1995 through EU membership.

If one wants an explanation for the deep-rooted prejudice and racism that is still alive and kicking among some Finns, one does not have to go far to find the reasons behind this societal malice. Our history and near-consensus interpretation of it reveals why.

Matters on the so-called multicultural debate in Finland are still in such a diaper stage that even our political leadership takes special care not to step on the foot of those that make racism respectable instead of defending those that are the victims of their attacks.

The highly one-sided debate in Finland on immigrants is seen as a threat by some Finns because new members of our society bring different points of views. As Finland becomes more multicultural demographically, some of our future historians, sociologists, writers, poets, politicians and others will challenge the very myths that were created in the previous century.

Our new identity and the history we write of ourselves as a nation in this century (new myths?) will be based on totally new points of departure. I for one believe it will be a very rich and inspiring debate that will strengthen our country. Given enough time, it will challenge more forcefully than ever those myths that keep the ogre of racism alive in our society.

It will be the awakening of a new Finland that will fit its needs as a nation in the new century.

MTV3 poll shows Finns do not want more refugees in their municipality

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A survey published by MTV3 (in Finnish) on December 12 showed that the majority of those polled do not want their municipality to accept refugees. Even though 34% had no opinion on the matter, 46% said they were either against or very much against their municipality accepting new refugees. Only 20% were either in favor or very much in favor of accepting refugees.

Another question asked was whether the state should force municipalities to accept refugees. The responses were pretty clear: 70% said no, 16% maybe. 8% yes and 6% had no opinion.

Even though the recession is a factor that has forced Finns to have a more negative attitude of refugees,  one cannot place the full blame on the economic situation. Contrary to the recession of the early 1990s, when unemployment soared close to 20%, the jobless rate in October stood at 8.2% versus 5.8% a year ago, according to Statistics Finland.

In my opinion, these types of polls only reinforce old stereotypes of foreigners in general and refugees in particular in Finland. There are very few polls that show what immigrants and refugees think about living  in Finland and the impact of high unemployment and exclusion.

Even though the economic situation has got worse, some Finns use this as a pretext to justify their prejudice against refugees and immigrants. Such attitudes are, in my opinion, a failure of the education system and the fact that there are still very few refugees and immigrants living in the country.

Finland’s New Identity in the New Century

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Here is the Finnish-language version of the article below that appeared in the 4/2009 isuue of Monitori-lehti.

What will our new identity be like in the present century as our society becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse? Will immigrants be clumped into one group and called New Finns, or will they prefer a hyphenated identity such as Iraqi-Finn?

A middle-school geography book published in 1941 claims that the Finns comprised of two main racial groups: Nordic and East Baltic. The characteristics of the former group was, ”tall, thin, blue-eyed, fair-haired and have red cheeks,” while the latter one was ”stockier, blonde-haired and have no redness on the cheeks.”

Even though there is no scientific basis for such classifications and they appear odd from our information-age perspective, some history books continued to classify Finns in such a manner up the 1970s. One of the matters that these type of racial classifications did was keep the definition of the Finn on very narrow terms.

In my opinion, our identity as Finns took a radical break from the past with the passage of the new Constitution (1999), Naturalisation (2003) and Non-Discrimination Act (2004). Even though there is no mention of the term multicultural society in these laws, they do show great sensibility to minorities and acceptance of cultural diversity.

Everyone knows that laws cannot change attitudes in an instant. They can, however, be important watersheds of our values and aspirations as a society.

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen has called immigrants uusia suomalaisia, or New Finns. In principle there is nothing wrong with this classification since it implies permanency as well as a readiness by society to accept newcomers. Others such as maahanmuuttaja, immigrant, have been met with mixed feelings since it implies non-permanency.

Even though these identity labels are imposed by the outside, it is important to keep in mind that what different groups call themselves depends on them. For some minorities this may be more important than for others.

Whatever identity a group prefers to use – New Finn, Finn, hyphenated, hybrid or none – isn’t the underlying case. The key factor is that we are capable as a society of drawing strength from our diversity, and that Finland can become a new home for those who may choose to live with us.

How do some Finns discriminate?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

In countries such as the United States and Brazil the term “race” is used to find out the ethnic diversity of their societies. While it is unclear why Brazil classifies in its census people from different ethnicities, in the United States it is done when drawing up electoral districts.

In order to find out more information on the implementation of the Employment Equity Act, Statistics Canada places minorities into “visible” and “invisible” groups. A visible minority is a “person, other than Aboriginal persons, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in color.”

Finland does not use ethnicity nor race to classify different groups but mother tongue.  If we look at the history of this country from the nineteenth century, the role of language has played, and continues to play, in identifying Finns.

Since there were few “visible” immigrants in the nineteenth century in this country, language must have played an important role in helping to figure out from which group the person was.

This brings forth an interesting question: Do some Finns generally discriminate due to mother tongue or skin color – or is it a double whammy? When some employers claim that immigrants “cannot speak Finnish well enough,” are they using language  in the same was as color or ethnicity would be used in the United States to discriminate?

Or is language used to discriminate against “invisible”  and language+ethnicity for “visible” immigrants?