Helsinki Times/Alexis Kouros: Immigrants need to organise for better treatment

Helsinki Times/Alexis Kouros: Immigrants need to organise for better treatment 1.4.2010

Immigrants in Finland are seen but not heard. We have become bystanders in a discussion concerning us. Finland talks about immigrants as if we were not in the room.

We are a nation of more than 200 million people. We are young and old, children and adults. We recognise no borders and go to the furthest places on earth, taking risks and leaving loved ones behind, to reach for our dreams. We are strong, but amongst the weakest. We are discriminated against and some of us have no rights. Most of us feel unwelcomed, maltreated, abused. Many of us have no access to healthcare. When things go wrong, we are among the first to be blamed for it.

If we would live in one country, it would be the fifths most populous country on earth and one of the largest economies in the world, with a gross domestic product of 300 billion US dollars. This nation would have the world’s most diverse culture, greatest number of languages and broadest diversity of human characteristics. Without a doubt, this would be the most interesting country in the world. Alas, we are dispersed all around the world in strange lands. We are the great nation of immigrants.

Every time someone asks me where I am from, hesitantly I tell them. But after living most of my life outside my native country, I am as foreign there as I am anywhere else. When I think of home, I think of Helsinki. I am sure this is the case with many who have been immigrants for years.

The dangers of a world without borders have been greatly exaggerated. In fact on today’s globe there are no borders for most of the things that can travel. Capital, merchandise, ideas, viruses, terror, crime, fear and hope can all spread to the furthest places on Earth almost instantly. Everything can travel freely, except human beings. Crossing the borders of Europe, deserted border control cabins are a good reminder of the absurdity of man-made frontiers. I remember when right after the break down of the Soviet Union, there was an apparently serious discussion in the Finnish media about what to do if masses of Russians would march towards the border to get to Finland. A similar horror story was told when it became clear that Estonia would join the EU: thousand of Estonians would colonise Finland and gangs of international criminals would exploit the open borders to get here. None of these paranoid delusions became reality.
Inevitably, the potential nurse, engineer, cook or taxi driver in the future Finland will be of a different colour and religion. The young of the world are growing up in faraway places.

Obviously, if you would remove all the borders in the world, only a small fraction of people would leave their homes for good to get to a better place to live. Immigration, the textbooks say, needs both a “push” and a “pull” factor. The decision to leave one’s homeland and to grow new roots is not an easy one. For the rich countries worried about masses of people coming to share their resources, the key element is to ease the push on the source nations of humanitarian migration. But unfortunately and on the contrary, the countries from which most of the world’s refugees leave, namely Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, have been ransacked by the world’s richest countries, with the United States in the lead.

“Immigration is about those who leave and those who stay behind” say sociologists. It is also about those who have already arrived, and those who would or would not allow immigration. Never before has there been such a reactionary debate on immigration in Finland as there is today.

Most of the negative discussion about immigration in Finland follows well-worn trends. Although the main motive behind opposition to newcomers is most probably racism and xenophobia, arguments are based on extreme cases of abuse of social services, dishonest asylum or family unification applications, crimes committed by immigrants, or in general immigrants being unsuitable to the Finnish society because of their culture or religion. Finland being a consensus society, the negativity of the discussion has spread to serious politicians with a vested interest in pandering to the noisiest sectors of the public. The narrow-mindedness and negativity has also spread to the mainstream media.

In an extremely biased episode broadcasted by YLE, MOT, an investigative journalism programme, attempted to calculate the “costs of multicultural Helsinki” which the journalists saw as the social benefits given to unemployed immigrant families. After several far fetched and extreme cases of how unemployed immigrant families in Finland receive the highest social welfare benefits in the world, the programme ended with a quote from a Swedish book which claimed that immigration costs “eat up” 22 per cent of Sweden’s tax revenue every year. In all these cost calculation cases, of course the direct costs of social welfare and benefits to the weakest, and probably the most unwanted group of immigrants was calculated, but how about the taxes paid by immigrants and the money spent by them? How can you calculate the value of a ready-to-work doctor, IT engineer or bus driver? What would it cost to raise a person to adult age, educate her as a nurse and put her to work in a hospital?

Would Nokia be able make massive profits and pay millions of euros in taxes without the contributions of hundreds of foreign engineers?

Finland has never been a magnet for immigrants. International migrants are about 4.2 per cent of the total population. By 2005, share of the world’s immigrant population falling on Finland’s shoulders was 0.08 per cent, one of the lowest in the Europe, and the world. For comparison, the same figures for Finland’s neighbours are: Russia 6.5 per cent, Sweden 0.6 per cent, Estonia 0.11 per cent. Even more distant, and politically closed, Belarus had 0.6 per cent of the world’s immigrants.

Fortunately for Finns, Finland has got the “nicer” type of immigrants. By the end of 2008, there have been less than 32,000 international immigrants who had moved to Finland as refugees or asylum seekers. This number is about 20 per cent of the total of 143,000 international immigrants residing in Finland. The main reason for people to move to Finland has been romantic. Contrary to common belief, there are more foreign women moving here to live with their Finnish husbands than the other way around.

So why is all the nagging in the media and especially internet discussion groups about the Somali mother with 15 children which, strangely enough, is becoming the prototype of all the immigrants in Finland?

The negative atmosphere today could become costly tomorrow. Finland has one of the oldest populations in Europe. 22 per cent of Finns were over 60 years old in 2009, and this figure is estimated to rise to 32 per cent by 2050. Increasing the retirement age to 65 is not a cure but a short-term relief measure applicable only to certain professions. The European average of over 60s was 22 per cent in 2009, and the corresponding estimate for 2050 is 34 per cent. The situation in Russia and other eastern European countries is no different, so useless to look around for younger workforce in those places. Inevitably, the potential nurse, engineer, cook or taxi driver in the future Finland will be of a different colour and religion. The young of the world are growing up in faraway places.

Resistance and public discussion around letting two grandmothers of immigrant households to stay in Finland has also been blown out of proportion. “Even if their families would pay their healthcare bills, that would not be the real cost to the society, as health care is subsidised by the government in Finland” wrote an opinion piece in the Helsingin Sanomat. Sadly enough, it was not written by a farmer from Kouvola, but a member of the Finnish Parliament.

Remittance flow, or the money immigrants send home, is one of the most important factors in preventing escalation of immigration itself. Billions of dollars sent home reduce the misery in the poor countries and in fact is the most important and reliable form of development aid today. Officially recorded remittance flows to developing countries reached a staggering 283 billion dollars in 2008. From this 0.70 billion was sent home by immigrants in Finland, which is about 0.33 per cent of Finland’s GDP. For comparison, Finland’s official development aid contribution for 2010 is 0.42 per cent of its GDP.

So do we immigrants accept and tolerate abuses of the welfare system, dishonest asylum applications or fake marriages? Of course not. But what do these things have to do with me, you may ask. I have worked, paid my taxes and contributed to this society as a useful member. Why should my kids be discriminated against at school? Is there any reason I should be considered a second-class citizen in this society just because I look different, don’t speak the language or were born somewhere else?

No you shouldn’t, and you should not settle for less than equal treatment. In a country where every big and small profession has a union, which fights for their rights, the only way for immigrants to get their voice heard is to unite. We are from extremely diverse backgrounds, places and cultures, but that should not matter. We may have only one thing in common: being an immigrant in Finland, but that could well be enough. It’s time to have a voice!