It is very easy to complain about why Finland should be reticent or more open about foreigners moving to the country to plug the ever-growing labor shortage and arrest the aging process of the Finnish population.
If I could lay the foundations of Finland’s new immigrant policy, I’d make the following recommendations:
1) Decide once and for all that Finland needs foreigners.
2) Accept that foreigners are a POSITIVE matter for Finnish society. Finnish culture — like the cultures the foreigners represent as well — will benefit and grow by living in the same country in a society that has become a beacon of hope for many down-trodden countries. The success — not the marginalization — of a foreigner will benefit Finland.
3) Some Finns’ views that integration is a one-way street is the surest way to create a society of insiders and outsiders. This will undermine Finland. Finnish culture and society has the means to inspire other national groups to take part in it.
4) As a result of the foreigners and especially their children and grandchildren, Finnish culture will enrich itself as a result. It will become stronger.
5) Foreigners, like Finns, have to be given opportunities to grow and develop. Like Martin Luther King said: a person should be weighed by his character NOT by his skin color. Like Finns, foreigners have the ability to bring new ideas. New ideas work if they are effective and successful.
6) Since the above-mentioned factors are in short supply these days — albeit changing slowly — there has to be a totally different view and attitude to the mindset. Without them we will fail miserably.
Ah, but you remember that you can lead the horse to the water but you cannot make him drink.
The politicians are one (and I think they agree on immigration and equality) but you also are talking about the proles.
The point you are missing is number 5 exactly: “a person should be weighed by his character NOT by his skin color”… maybe add “or that he comes from some other culture”.
You are however claiming that being a foreigner is automatically positive? How about the bit about weighing his character first? Because that is exactly what Finns do, they weigh the character first, before even giving any person a benefit of the doubt, be it a Finn or a foreigner.
Finland will fail miserably if we let all kinds of people live just as they please without respecting the society they are living in. If they wish to come with to build the society they at first must learn how the the society works, and if they wish to be regarded as contributing something positive – how about weighing the society and figuring out what is the positive you can contribute rather than imagining your ideas would be automatically better than what the society already has a consensus on?
How about if you think you are contributing something “positive” but instead come across as a cultural imperialist invading and destroying a native culture? So now that you have been weighed and found to be of a bad character, why should the Finns pay any attention to your agenda?
You must remember it is the Finns who weigh your character.
Finland needs foreigners?
Maybe Finland needs to financially inspire people to have more children. At the moment there is no incentive/prospects for Finns to have a big family especially when they see in their own family no reward.
At this very moment proposals to stamp out illegal immigration are being put forward to a ministerial meeting in Cannes by France to EU members, which hopes other member states will adopt them in October. The European Commission estimates there are up to 8 million illegal migrants in the EU paying no tax other than value added, and lining the employers coffers. (That can’t go on.)
I would go some of the way with you: if and when there are no unemployed, and every avenue exhausted to get workers then by all means. How many foreigners were unemployed in Mikkeli did you say not so long ago 35% and how many nationwide?
50% % overall I’d say. How come these are not employed.
Man it’s not workers Finbusiness is looking for. It’s new low industrial wage slaves they seek and they’re playing the likes of you and me over the rights of migration and rights. They don’t give a shit – about enriching society – migrants and their rights. As I just quoted above: when the jobs run out, suddenly/how quick the meetings are call to curb migration.
Hard for eight million to hide even in a big place like Europe with nobody knowing they’re illegal?
I think in another post comments we had a link to Spain where they’re having an economic slump and telling their immigrants “pack up and go home”. Of course if you live in a multicultural immigrant bubble it is easy to leave (or is it?) but its easier for people to tell you to leave as well! You cannot tell “one of us” to leave quite as easily (though Finns do that occasionally too).
Here in Finland it was similar – you would get government subsidies to build a factory somewhere above the Arctic Circle. Then the county would offer free housing for people to move there. But now in the global economy the factory gets sold to China, and the family has to try and sell their worthless house and move to scrape a living where the work is in the congested capital area with high housing prices. So if the people within a country are treated like this, what solidarity can we expect globally? We already see the factories moving within China to cheaper areas and leaving the country. And what is left in the countries with less strict environmental rules? After the factory in Finland leaves you still can herd reindeer, when the factories leave in less developed nations they leave polluted ground water and a destroyed ecosystem nobody can survive in.
Hrm. Maybe a bit of a rant there. But yes, I am still saying this “need for workers” is need for exploitable and dispensable workers”. Then again if the work isn’t done here – its done somewhere else.
You see if foreigner workers were realy an absolute matter of survival to keep the economy going, and support the aging Finns. (that makes me laugh, as if somehow Finns have stopped having children, and the population is much/any different since independence) then I would imagine proper laws would be made to accommodate all concerned. Clearly this is not the case in Finland, and other places. It is in fact a game with poor peoples (in need) lives. Pure exploitation
Foreigners are not really needed in Finland man. Proper pay for proper work, and negotiation in the light of the business finances. Not ”we only made 20 million this year to the 100 million we made last year.
The last eight years have been for Europe/Finland quite a boom time. Never have social services been so down graded. Why on earth do things get so bad for the poor in boom time. I know the answer to that is with the creation of the small business (fever) it generates more tax for the government, and more middle class, but what we forget is with the creation of the small business the prospects for the long steady employment declines making more on the margins depending on social assistance therefore they have to cut the benefits to keep the new upwardly mobile doing business.
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NEW YORK TIMES (the heat is on)
States Take New Tack on Illegal Immigration
MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter.
Businesses are struggling to find workers/slaves who work all hours for half nothing.
“It was very hard,” said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees.
Last month, 260 illegal immigrants in Iowa were sentenced to five months in prison for violations of federal identity theft laws.
This is efficient immigration policy, and moreover promoting multiculturalism on taxpayers expense.
http://www.hs.fi/omaelama/artikkeli/Heidi+Jalid+hoitaa+yksin+seitsemää+lastaan/HS20060514SI1YO02vn8
Hi Detant, nice to hear from you. There is no story in this link. It has been removed.
Yes there is. Right click and “open in new tab/window”.