Author: Migrant Tales

EDITORIAL: Finnish immigration debate

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By Enrique Tessieri

Is the present one-sided and passionate debate on immigration in Finland going to turn ugly? Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Stubb poured some needed cold water on the debate by stating that it “reeks of racism, nationalism, populism, and xenophobia.”

The wayward and reckless route has even frightened some of its main perpetrators. Probably fearing a backlash to all immigrants, Jussi Halla-aho of the True Finns said that the majority of Finns are not against immigration as a Helsingin Sanomat poll showed. He said that the poll should have asked whether Finns want more refugees from countries such as Somalia and Iraq.

The statement by Halla-aho and the poll by Helsingin Sanomat do not tell us anything new. How many countries can you name where its inhabitants favor more immigration? How many believe their country has too few immigrants?

Opinion polls and attitude studies of immigrants in Finland reflect the same patronizing stances as the one-sided debate on immigration. They explain why our near-non-existent immigration policy has failed and why too many immigrants live marginalized from Finnish society.

Social Democratic Party (SDP) chairman, Jutta Urpilainen, stoked the immigrant-debate fires on Saturday when she blamed the government and immigrants for the problem.

Taking into account the lack of jobs in Finland and high immigrant unemployment, Urpilainen said that the SDP’s new immigration program would not only force people to learn the Finnish or Swedish language, but they would have to get off unemployment as well. She did not elaborate if unemployed immigrants were on the dole because they were taking advantage of the system or that they did not learn Finnish or Swedish because they did not want to.

At the present rate those who don’t want immigrants to come to Finland are sitting pretty. The present one-sided debate is not only forcing immigrants to reconsider their residences in Finland but scaring off potential newcomers.

Why would anyone want to move to such a hostile country where the immigration debate is one-sided and  “reeks of racism, nationalism, populism, and xenophobia?”

YLE: Another feather in Finland’s media immigration hysteria hat

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As the political climate gets tenser in Finland due to the recession, a good example of another red herring threat caused by immigration is a news story by YLE on Wednesday that claims that 3,200 foreign nationals were  not allowed to enter Finland illegally, according to the Finnish Border Guard.

These types of stories of the “threat” of outsiders are becoming more common and fueling a collective hysteria against immigrants and people coming from outside Finland (especially Russia). While the law should do everything possible to thwart illegal immigration, such claims must be put into perspective.

Perspective 1: Over 3 million tourists come to Finland (not mentioned in the story because it would deflate much of its strength) and 3,200 is a drop in the bucket, or about 0.01%.  Should the headline read: “Thanks to the efforts of the Finnish Border Guard, only 0.01% of tourists attempt to enter Finland illegally?” A bit misleading, no? What about this one: “Illegal immigration not an issue because 0.01% attempted to enter Finland with forged documents?”

Perspective 2: Why was this story published and why didn’t YLE give comparative figures on the total number of tourists or compared it with last year’s figures? The answer is obvious: laziness and sloppy reporting.

Perspective 3: Another interesting claim made by the Finnish Border Guard is that all of these illegals would end up human-trafficking victims in Finland or in other countries.How do they know this? That is a claim not a fact but serves to fuel anti-immigration/anti-Russian hysteria.

Peter Kivisto’s definition of multiculturalism

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Here is a definition by Peter Kivisto of multiculturalism as a social policy:

Multiculturalism refers to a view that ethnically or religiously diverse societies should protect and promote diversity and should be based on both individual and group rights.

As one may recall in an earlier post, Finland is not officially a multicultural nation such as Canada, Australia and England. There is no mention of the term “multicultural society” in our Constitution and Equality Act. However, Kivisto, states that Finland is a nation with multicultural susceptibilities.

HS Suomen Gallup: 60% feel that Finland should not take more immigrants

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A poll commissioned by Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest-circulation daily, and conducted by Suomen Gallup showed that close to 60% of Finns now feel that the country should not increase the number of immigrants. The corresponding percentage three years ago was 36%.

These types of polls, in my opinion,are very one-sided and help keep alive negative attitudes and scapegoats to blame the recession. They are also carte blanches to insult more vociferously other groups since “it is ok to be racist during a recession” rather than in an economic boom cycle.

Heikki Evarsti, a social policy professor at the University of Turku, believes: “As immigration is not yet any major phenomenon in Finland, relatively few Finns have personal contacts with immigrants, which is why individual citizens’ views have hardly had any significant impact on the public opinion.”

Certainly these types of surveys are welcomed by anti-immigration groups such as the True Finns and serve as a warning for other parties. The Helsingin Sanomat article says that other political parties are finding it highly tempting to follow the True Finns’ anti-immigration charge for fear of losing votes as parliamentary elections near.

I personally believe that in this decade as more immigrants come to the country and show with their work and determination their importance to Finland, attitudes will change very rapidly.

Those that jump on the  populist anti-immigration bandwagon today are the ones that will, at the end of the day, lose the most.  Keep a close watch on the parties and the politicians who vacillate opportunistically from one side of the fence to the other.

Finns are an intelligent lot. The last thing they will do is be spoon fed hatred and incomprehension by anti-immigrant groups and figures on personal messianic power-ego trips.

Racism debate: Finland today – United States in the 1970s

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By Enrique Tessieri

Some Finns argue today that they are automatically labelled racists if they speak out too strongly against immigration. The statement resembles very much the atmosphere in the United States in the early 1970s, when blacks started to win legal as well as social rights after the civil rights movement.

The fact that some openly question racism in Finland should be seen as a welcome and positive matter. The knee-jerk reaction of different anti-immigration groups show that society openly questions their agendas.

Such a debate in the 1990s and before would have been impossible on such a scope since the racial ideology of the country was different due to the underwhelming size of Finland’s immigrant population and far-flungness.

If the United States awoke from its segregated deep sleep thanks to the civil rights movement led by men such as Martin Luther King, Finland is also awakening to the same reality. I remember very well the new USAmerica that the civil rights movement had helped forge. We too were sensitized into a new way of thinking and interacting with blacks and other minorities. For many of us, our old views and fears of other groups had been thrown into the trash can of history.

Contrary to the civil rights movement of the United States, the ever-growing immigrant population in Finland is awakening the country to a new century. At least today racism is being questioned when before it was normal, accepted and even promoted openly as something “Finnish” and “patriotic.” In post-civil rights United States, racism got a hard blow. Such behavior became shameful and socially inappropriate.

What is important about the shift in social behavior in the United States and Finland today is that it ushers in and questions old stereotypes that are based on racism.

One of the greatest achievements of the US civil rights movement was that it started to do away with the racial stigmas labelled on different groups by whites. With respect to the blacks, this happened almost overnight in some parts of the country.  Seeing is believing today: President Barack Obama.

Whenever a Finn uses the “fear-of-being-labelled-a-racist” argument because he/she is against immigrants, immigration and/or refugees, it should be seen as a knee-jerk reaction of an ever-dwindling minority.

Openly and vociferously questioning our racism is unique, courageous and a watershed in our society. It is the brave new face of Finland in the new century.

Xenophobic death threats to the Finnish government

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The most recent death threats to some members of Finland’s government as well as immigrants reported by Nelonen television by a group of  fanatics is in some cases the doing of the politicians, who have not spoken out strongly enough against racism but have by and large preferred to remain silent on the matter.

Their timidness to such a threat has only emboldened fanatics.

UPDATE March 2: A good example of such hesitancy was pointed out by Jonas, who regularly visits our blog: Vanhanen, speaking to the Swedish news division of Yle, did condemn the death threat to Thors – but only worryingly several days later and then only after Stefan Wallin demanded it. And, as far as I am aware, I am yet to hear him do the same thing in the Finnish-language mass media, which is yet more concerning.

The death threats can be accessed at the following website. In the blog, the anonymous Finn gives a short bio of himself/herself after threatening to murder four members of government, President Tarja Halonen and encourage others to kill immigrants: I am a normal (?!) working family man/woman. I don´t hate foreigners and I am apolitical. I understand, however, that we are at a crossroads with respect to our country. (Olen tavallinen työssäkäyvä perheellinen. En vihaa ulkomaalaisia enkä omaa mitään poliitista suuntausta. Ymmärrän kuitenkin, että olemme tärkeässä ratkaisupisteessä maamme kannalta.)

Minister of migration and European affairs, Astrid Thors, who has been the center of a number of death threats by anti-immigrant extremists,  has been one of their prime targets.

What is most surprising about this recent incident is that it happened in a country that prizes itself for being a Nordic welfare state and whose educational system has received  global recognition in the Pisa study. The Pisa study does not evaluate the knowledge of 15 year olds in humanities but in math, reading and science.

Where have we gone wrong?

Throughout my years in Finland I have heard various politicians tell me in silence that they do not consider it wise to stand up too vociferously in favor of immigrants because of the strong anti-foreign sentiment.

I remember writing a feature on refugees in Mikkeli in eastern Finland in the early 1990s for a large-circulation weekly. I received as a result three death threats.  It was a good matter that my then-six-year-old daughter did not answer the phone.

Even though the police are investigating this recent incident, it is clear that these types of groups are a problem in Finland. Not acknowledging them or hiding our heads in the sand will only fuel the problem. How many more alarm bells do we need to hear?

The way that a democratic society deals with groups that take the law in their hands is with the full weight of the law and by speaking out against the problem.

Finland cannot afford anything less.

Immigration to Finland and the cold war

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While history provides a good answer why Finland as a nation has shown a clear manifest unease of foreigners and outside investment, it still does not provide us with an all-encompassing answer as to why. Are we still resentful of newcomers because our language rights were granted in 1862?  Is it due to the Russification period, when the Russian Empire attempted to impose their language and culture on us at the cost of our precious autonomy?

If so, we Finns hold grudges for a very long time.

Irrespective of those two historical factors, I believe the biggest culprit of our present-day negative stance gained strength during World War 2 and the cold war years. Even though we rebuilt our nation from the ashes of war, we had the right to be resentful of the Soviet Union but were censored harshly by the Finnish political intelligentsia to air our views.

The fear of the USSR, which strengthened our negative view in general of all outsiders, was reinforced by our “successful” relations with Moscow. The history of Finland in the cold war era is in a nutshell a story about how a nation broke out little by little of its political and economic near-isolation from Western Europe that culminates in 1995, when we became EU members.

Our special relationship with Moscow gave birth to Finlandization. Even though the relationship was good for Finnish-Soviet trade (we bartered manufactured goods that we could not sell elsewhere for oil), it was devastating for democracy, freedom of the press, internationalization, immigration to this country and to our identity as a nation.

During those near-stagnant cultural and political years, immigrants were called “aliens” (muukalainen) and refugees “loikkari” (a person who skips a country).

If I were a politician living at that time and wanted to impose my rule on the country, I would have certainly used the Moscow card like Center Party icon Urho Kekkonen did on many occasions.

While some Finns believe that enough historical psychoanalysis has been carried out on those bygone years, nothing could be further from the truth. There are still many skeletons in closets that will haunt and surprise us in the future. One way of keeping those revelations from appearing is by keeping them to a minimum with respect to our former relations with the USSR and the cold war period.

By keeping guarding the secrets of the past we end up doing great harm to ourselves and future generations because we continue to wrongly believe that the way things were done politically, democratically and economically (monopolies and oligopolies) were right.  A good example of what I am saying is the Center Party: they appear to be for the EU but in reality they continue support it opportunistically and reject it at every turn, like Paavo Väyrynen as a political phenomenon.

Don’t expect anything to change in Finland too rapidly. Even so, part of the answer lies in how courageously we open up the cold war years in order to understand who we are today.

Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia

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In order to clear up matters a little, I would like to show how multiculturalism as a social policy is defined in Canada and Australia. Contrary to Finland, both counties have been strongly influenced by immigration.

ADDITION (March 1, 2010): If there were a list of countries with liberal and conservative policies on immigration, Finland would end up at the bottom-end of the latter group. It has not only been in immigration policy (or the lack of it/Finland got its first immigration act in 1983!) but in its view of foreign investment (see Restricting Act of 1939, which was in force until 1992!).

What is incredible to note, and taking into account the ever-higher number of pensioners and thus a threat to our economic wellbeing, NO political party in Finland has an official immigration policy.  This is, in my opinion, incredible taking into account the demographic threats that will either make or break us economically this decade.

Even though Finland is not officially a multicultural nation, its constitution and laws encourage the same values but not as passionately.   In the Finnish Constitution and Equality Act there are, for example, no mention of the term “multicultural society.”

Moreover, in these countries I am certain that people do not go around describing their societies as multicultural every chance they get. However, it is kind of interesting that we in Finland, which has a very small foreign population, use this term liberally.


Multiculturalism in Canada

The concept of Canada as a “multicultural society” can be interpreted in different ways: descriptively (as a sociological fact), prescriptively (as ideology), from a political perspective (as policy), or as a set of intergroup dynamics (as process).

As fact, “multiculturalism” in Canada refers to the presence and persistence of diverse racial and ethnic minorities who define themselves as different and who wish to remain so. Ideologically, multiculturalism consists of a relatively coherent set of ideas and ideals pertaining to the celebration of Canada’s cultural diversity. Multiculturalism at the policy level is structured around the management of diversity through formal initiatives in the federal, provincial and municipal domains. Finally, multiculturalism is the process by which racial and ethnic minorities compete to obtain support from central authorities for the achievement of certain goals and aspirations.

This study focuses on an analysis of Canadian multiculturalism both as a demographic reality and as a public policy.

Multiculturalism in Australia

‘Multicultural’ is a term that describes the cultural and linguistic diversity of Australian society. Cultural and linguistic diversity was a feature of life for the first Australians, well before European settlement. It remains a feature of modern Australian life, and it continues to give us distinct social, cultural and business advantages.

The Australian Government’s multicultural policy addresses the consequences of this diversity in the interests of the individual and society as a whole. It recognises, accepts, respects and celebrates our cultural diversity.

The freedom of all Australians to express and share their cultural values is dependent on their abiding by mutual civic obligations. All Australians are expected to have an overriding loyalty to Australia and its people, and to respect the basic structures and principles underwriting our democratic society. These are: the Constitution, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as the national language, the rule of law, acceptance and equality.

What Finland’s immigration policy lacks

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By Enrique Tessieri

If we look at the dismal amount of immigrants and refugees as well as high unemployment one can reach only one conclusion: a policy that has failed miserably. Certainly progress has been made: the number of immigrants has risen albeit slowly to  143,256 today from 12,670 in 1981, while unemployment has come down officially from 53% in 1994 to over 20%.

One of the biggest failures of our immigration policy is that it is really not an immigration policy at all but looks like a poorly assembled hall where newcomers are given a bit of schooling in the Finnish langauge and culture and then required to face the brave new world by getting a job.

The crux of the matter is that we are going to have to do a much better job if we want labor immigrants to fill jobs left by our ever-growing number of pensioners. One of the first steps in this direction is to offer more than a wham-bang-thank-you-mam approach to immigration.

Immigration is a powerful social force that can work to a society’s favor if it is done correctly. The basic starting point for a successful immigration policy is in the hands of the host society. If there is rejection, ignorance, bigotry and lack of opportunities such a policy will fail as it has today.

Another important aspect of a successful immigration policy is that it must have something more than the wham-bang in order to succeed. Those same values that unite Finns and make them proud of their society should rub off on immigrants.

What are these values? They are those in our laws and our compassion and suffering that we faced as a nation. It is in solidarity and opportunity – a real sense of community where we live together for the common good. The pathway to incorporation into Finnish society should be much faster than today.

Even though these types of values may sound as if they were from some imaginary place, it is the only way towards a successful immigration policy and sheds light why our integration policy has failed despite its good intentions. Offering no dreams and hopes to newcomers and marginalizing them is sowing the seeds of pesent and future discord.

What kind of a society are we offering newcomers if we jealously guard our dreams to ourselves?

The role of the Finnish social welfare state and newcomers

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It is surprising that one can hear these days in private conversation from some teachers and people working with immigrants and refugees that some national groups should never be  brought to this country because they will never adapt to our way of life. “Why do they continue to bring them here?” some say.

Another affirmation that has surprised me for quite some time is the naive view that we can choose those that we like to move to this country and live happily ever after.

These two comments not only reveal a generous dose of ignorance about the dynamics of immigration and refugees but relfect their setbacks and frustration in teaching and working with immigrants and refugees.

If a person believes that fifty-year-old women from the Middle East should never be brought to this country refugees because “people of her kind will never adapt,” then we should, in all fairness, apply the same standard to Finns that are not adapted to society: the alcoholics, the long-term middle-aged unemployed, people who suffer from chronic depression as well as a long list of  others.

When I asked one of the teachers what should be done, silence answered my question. I asked if we should round up all those we consider “maladapted and/or unadaptable” and deport them back to their war-torn countries? In the case of those Finns we consider marginal from society, should we also lock them up in some asylum or island and throw away the keys so they won’t bother us any longer?

A relative of mine once said that when one moves to a foreign country, one learns new things about oneself. In the same respect, immigrants and refugees are showing the positive and negative side of our society because it is being put to the test, sometimes under extreme condtions.

I believe that one of the major problems of our immigrant and refugee policy is littered with good intention but lacks a coherent policy. Newcomers are showing some positive and unsettling matters about our society such as bigotry and ignorance. It is also showing the most important matter of all: lack of clear leadership from those who should show the way to a successful immigration/refugee policy.