Since Finland’s government shifted to the right in 2023, the country’s migration policies have gradually tightened. This is making migrants’ lives more unstable, and is particularly hard for those seeking work, found InfoMigrants on a four-day visit. Discrimination in the job market adds to their challenges.
“Do we need to apply in Finnish?”, Lamine Messaoudi asks a recruitment firm employee. “I have applied for almost every single job on your platform, even cleaning, but it’s difficult.”
The 28-year-old is one of over a hundred migrants attending a job fair in the major city of Oulu in central Finland. Many, like Messaoudi, are unemployed; others are primarily here to network and practice their Finnish.
“I heard you already speak Finnish, that’s a plus,” the employee replies. “The more you know it, the easier it is to get a job.”
For international job seekers in Finland like Messaoudi, whose B1 level of Finnish is typically the bare minimum to be considered for job interviews, the job market’s high language requirements often represent insurmountable hurdles — even for low-paying jobs.
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‘The first barrier is the language’
“The first border [barrier] is the language,” the Moroccan, who says he applied for 250 jobs over the past two years, tells InfoMigrants. “You need to speak Finnish more or less fluently, otherwise you cannot understand your boss or teammate. So you need to push yourself more and more to learn Finnish.”
Outsized language requirements in the job market are not the only challenge immigrants in Finland face. Since the current governing coalition, including the right-wing populist Finns party, came to power in 2023 it has gradually tightened Finnish migration and asylum policies.
Among other things, the rules for family reunification, financial aid for asylum seekers, detention and deportation of rejected asylum seekers and the entry of foreigners have become stricter. In addition, the government announced in April that all land borders with Russia will remain closed indefinitely, and the right to asylum has effectively been suspended.
“The number and speed of the changes is unprecedented,” says Erna Bodström, a researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland. “The government is making these changes in small little packages, most of which may not seem very consequential individually. But when you look at the whole picture, you can see that together they make it much harder to both establish a stable life here in Finland and come to Finland in the first place.”
Difficulties hiring international talent
Anna-Maija Västilä, who helps Finnish companies recruit talent, says a long-standing problem for the private sector is the lengthy process of getting work permits for their international hires, which is the responsibility of the Finnish Immigration Service, known as Migri.
In addition, the rules and requirements of acquiring foreign talent becoming more restrictive adds to the general uncertainty and could cause Finnish firms, those without any employees from abroad in particular, to become “less willing to hire foreigners as a result,” she told InfoMigrants at the job fair.
One such change her clients have voiced concerns about, she says, is the government trying to introduce a time limit in which an international employee needs to find new work after being laid off — either within three months or half a year once the amendment takes effect, which is expected in April 2025.
“The hiring process in Finland takes a long time,” Västilä says. “Companies can have up to five interview rounds. So it’s really not possible to find work fast, especially in your own field.”
Recruiting specialist Anna-Maija Västilä at the ‘MegaMatchmaking’ job fair in Oulu, Finland on September 25, 2024 | Photo: BusinessOuluImmigrants have to ‘go the extra mile’
Lukumanu Iddrisu, who was also at the job fair agrees: “Research shows that even locals need more than six months to find a new job. So how do they expect an international to get one in three? It’s entirely unrealistic.”
Iddrisu is what you could call a model example of successful integration. Originally from Ghana, he arrived in Finland ten years ago and has made a name for himself as a brand strategist and career advisor. At the moment, he’s working as a project manager and a part-time lecturer. “I’m also a Finnish citizen,” he adds matter-of-factly.
Iddrisu believes migrants in Finland have to “go the extra mile” to realize their career goals. “The job market is not as easy to penetrate for them. You have to be ambitious, humble and motivated to start somewhere, even if it’s a low-level task or job,” he told InfoMigrants, adding that language posed a barrier for him, too.
He has also been discriminated against numerous times, including being called the N-word. But he says he hasn’t faced any racism or discrimination in the job market himself, although he knows others that have.
Ghanaian-Finn Lukumanu Iddrisu at the ‘MegaMatchmaking’ job fair in Oulu, Finland on September 25, 2024 | Photo: Marko Sulonen
Finland’s relatively high unemployment rate — around seven percent of Finland’s 5.6 million people are currently without a job — makes it even more difficult for newcomers to find work. At the same time, Finland’s aging society depends on steady immigration and foreign workers: Non-profit economic research institute ETLA last year estimated that Finland needs a net migration of 44,000 people a year to “stabilize the size of the birth cohorts and the labor force”.
Are populist policies causing a competitive disadvantage?
According to French researcher Gwenaëlle Bauvois, who studies the radical right, extremism and anti-immigration movements at the University of Helsinki, Finland’s known problem with institutionalized racism is especially pronounced in the job market.
A 2022 University of Helsinki study, for instance, found that employers preferred Finnish applicants over ethnic candidates. “If you had a foreign name, especially one that sounds non-European, you typically wouldn’t be called back for an interview,” Bauvois told InfoMigrants. “The study clearly showed that discrimination against immigrant job seekers is a widespread phenomena in Finland.”
And it is not just candidates who are struggling, employers are also finding the new policies are cramping their future plans. Antti Honkanen, who works for a large Finnish IT consulting company, laments a discrepancy between the growing private and public sectors’ need for foreign workers and tougher requirements, especially regarding language.
“We’d like to hire world-class expertise, but since laws and regulations are getting stricter, it’s getting harder and harder each year,” he said, adding that the public sector now mandates fluency in Finnish. A recent international survey by expat network Internations asking its members about quality of life, work, ease of settling in and personal finances, ranked Finland 51st out of 53 countries.
Both Honkanen and recruiting specialist Västilä fear that the rule changes and restrictions could cost Finland its competitive edge.
“We are really a small country, so if we are not able to attract international talent here, either because of bureaucracy or we don’t make people feel welcome, we lose a huge amount of knowledge, ideas and networks,” Västilä says.
Honkanen stresses that the recent changes have even made a considerable number of people who moved to Finland to work consider leaving the country. “Former colleagues of mine are wondering if they have a future here. It’s a real shame, because they are experts in their fields and already have family over here.”
Iddrisu, the immigrant from Ghana, also finds Finland’s shift to the right concerning. “Policies that don’t make people feel like they belong could lead to many other problems, he fears. What the right has been preaching also influences some of those locals who already have a tendency to the right to begin acting in a way that leads to even more discrimination, racism and possibly violence.”
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‘They are scared to do normal stuff’
The Valkea shopping center is located in Oulu’s city center, around a five-minute car ride away from the job fair venue. This year, it made national and European headlines when a migrant minor and a man with a foreign background were stabbed in two separate, apparently racist attacks only a few days apart. Both victims survived. In September, another migrant youth barely survived a knife attack, which authorities say was not racially motivated.
The Valkea shopping center Oulu, Finland seen on September 25, 2024 | Photo: Benjamin Bathke/InfoMigrants
Afghan migrant Aliomid Hashemi, who arrived in Finland in 2015 and currently works for non-profit Startup Refugees, says the stabbings have instilled fear in Oulu’s immigrant community.
“I’ve been talking to many people, they all stressed how scared they are to do normal stuff,” Hashemi told InfoMigrants. “One of our Startup Refugees clients told me they constantly watch over their shoulder to see who’s walking behind them.”
Although he’s not scared himself, he says he has had to endure his share of verbal and physical threats over the years.
“One day, on my way to the school where I was doing a summer job and learning Finnish, I suddenly saw someone running after me. He was wielding a knife and shouted ‘Go home!’ and other insults in Finnish. I ran around the cars in the parking lot, so fortunately he couldn’t get me,” Hashemi recalls, adding something similar happening to a kid was just a “horrible” thought.
He insists that he gets along well with many Finnish people despite their different backgrounds; when asked why he thinks racism is so widespread, he says it’s a mix of ignorance about what migrants can bring to the country, people blaming their own problems on newcomers, as well as (social) media spreading biased and fake information.
Afghan refugee Aliomid Hashemi (left) at the ‘MegaMatchmaking’ job fair in Oulu, Finland on September 25, 2024 | Photo: Benjamin Bathke/InfoMigrantsUptick in racist attitudes
A number of surveys and statistics appear to show an increase in both xenophobic attitudes and action against foreigners in recent years.
According to two representative surveys, the proportion of Finns who say they strongly oppose racist claims is on its way down. 56 percent of Finns strongly opposed blatant racist claims in 2020, down from 65 percent in 2015.
Another recent report perhaps demonstrates just how big Finland’s problem with racism is. Last year’s Being Black in the EU survey among immigrants by the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights found that Finland is one of the continent’s worst countries for Black people. In all but one of the eight categories, which range from discrimination over racist harassment to racism in employment, Finland ranks among the worst three countries.
When it comes to racist violence, Finland even tops the list, with 11 percent of respondents saying they experienced a racist attack in the five years before the survey. (The number of Black people in Finland isn’t known as ethnicity is not recorded in statistics; however, around 0.5 percent of the population speak Somali, by far the most common African language among migrants in Finland.)
Hate crimes
The number of reported hate crimes in Finland has been rising steadily since 2017. According to Finland’s annual police report, the vast majority of last year’s 1,200 cases were related to racism, with the most common suspects being young white Finnish men.
“The majority of the victims are Finnish citizens, but they come from different ethnic backgrounds,” says expert Bauvois. She also notes that according to police estimates, only one in five victims file a report. While the police report doesn’t say whether the share of serious crimes like stabbings are increasing, it does state that the number of “incitement to hate crimes doubled” from 2022 to 2023.
Researcher Bauvois thinks this last bit has a lot to do with the ruling Finns party’s xenophobic rhetoric, its baseless conspiracy theories — and reports of them inciting violence.
Last year, for instance, Finnish media reported that a now former Finns politician allegedly sent fake bomb attacks to three other political parties’ offices. And in 2018, a local Finns politician was fined for inciting violence against the Finnish Red Cross, which runs many of the country’s reception centers for asylum seekers. Bauvois believes this kind of behavior and rhetoric has real-life consequences for migrants in Finland.
“It can lead some of the most radical supporters of the Finns party, and of the radical right in general, to themselves commit crimes,” she told InfoMigrants. “It could be in the form of online harassment, but also physical attacks, including potentially more serious crimes like stabbings.”
Finland, along with its Nordic neighbors, are well known for topping charts globally in education, equality, and happiness levels. But they also have above-average rates of racist violence | Photo: Sunny Celeste / Bildagentur-online/picture allianceMigration policies are tightened gradually
“Already in December 2015, the government launched a program with the aim of preventing asylum seekers from coming to Finland,” Bodström told InfoMigrants. “It was actually talking about ‘uncontrolled migration’.” Starting in 2016, and spearheaded by the Finns party, the government then introduced law changes that included abolishing one category of international protection and making family reunification harder.
In last year’s election, the Finns party, which currently polls at 16 percent, came to power for the second time. It succeeded in imposing on their coalition partners their anti-immigrant agenda, which directly or indirectly affects around one in ten people in Finland who migrated there, or were born to parents who did.
Migration researcher Erna Bodström | Photo: Erna Bodström
Back at the job fair in Oulu, Moroccan migrant Lamine Messaoudi is reflecting on his struggles to find his footing in the job market.
His background is in marketing and accounting, but he’s now studying mechanical engineering. Messaoudi, who moved to Finland in 2022 for family reunification reasons, says it will take up to six years before he can put his new skills to use.
“You lose power actually, by thinking too much,” he says when asked how starting from scratch makes him feel. “I’m also thinking about those people who come here at age 40 or older who have to start again. It takes time. Psychologically speaking, it’s a little bit difficult.”
He also says that he never encountered racism or discrimination, neither in his personal life nor in the job market. “I know many Finnish people. Maybe they are racist with migrants who are bad to their country, but when they see a humble man, they are very nice to interact with,” he says, adding that companies need to pick the best available candidate.
The train station in Oulu, Finland seen on September 15, 2024 | Photo: Benjamin Bathke/InfoMigrants
The venue of the ‘MegaMatchmaking’ job fair in Oulu, Finland on September 25, 2024 | Photo: Benjamin Bathke/InfoMigrants
The ‘MegaMatchmaking’ job fair in Oulu, Finland on September 25, 2024 | Photo: Benjamin Bathke/InfoMigrantsPreviousNext
These personal views notwithstanding, life for migrants in Finland is objectively less welcoming thinks migration and asylum expert Erna Bodström. She calls the flurry of laws and changes under the government coalition a “paradigm shift in migration” that will make it much harder to stay in Finland for asylum seekers and employment-based migrants alike.
“If you’re on a work-based visa and you lose your work, you’re out. If you’re an asylum seeker and the situation in your home country changes considerably, you’re out,” she told InfoMigrants. “So a permanent residence permit and citizenship are the only two options that guarantee a stable life in Finland. And the fact that they are prolonging the required residence time to apply for both and making it harder to get them overall means people will not have a very stable life in Finland for longer periods of time, which increases insecurity.”