Orpo’s government’s plan on migration – eroding possibilities of making a life in Finland?

By Daria Krivonos and Olivia Maury

Image: Timon Studler/Unsplash

Attention to racism in Finnish society has increased during the past months. One of the reasons has been a series of scandals with several members of the Finnish government making racist statements. Consequently, protests that centered racism as the key concern have been organized by a variety of actors with more actions (such as the MASS PROTEST against the new Finnish Immigration Policy and the ME EMME VAIKENE! mass demonstration) planned during the coming weeks.

The public reaction and mobilization in the aftermath of a series of scandals should indeed be applauded. But the problem of racism should be limited neither solely to the matter of one’s public expression, individual behaviour or a wrongdoing, nor to the white majority’s concern over the negatively impacted image of Finland in the international arena.

When racism is understood as systemic to the nation-state sustained by its border regime and immigration controls, it conflicts with the idea that racism is an individualized sickness, a matter of hate speech or simple ignorance. What often remains invisible in the public discussion on racism is the normalization of a two-tier society with highly unequal access to work, housing, welfare provision, labour protection and citizenship – contrary to the long-outdated image of Finland as an equal society with “universalist” principles.

The Finnish government’s recently proposed changes to immigration and citizenship policies further shrink criteria for political and social membership for non-citizens. They deepen the conditions for treating migrants as exploitable and expendable labour force, creating unnecessary delays for getting permanent residency and citizenship, limiting access to seeking asylum, and tightening the requirements for getting a residence permit.  

In this blogpost, we extend the understanding of racism beyond individual actions to the invisibilized and institutionalized norms and practices within Finnish state structures that normalize the divide between “people of a place” (Native citizens) and “people out of place” (Migrants). These norms and practices are further entrenched by the recent changes proposed by the new Finnish government, which we discuss below.

Here, we examine merely some of the key points of the proposed changes. While focusing on the new programme, we do not intend to romanticize the previous condition of non-citizens and non-white people sustained by everyday and institutional racism, discrimination in the labour market, lower pay, police violence and ethnic profiling, and deportations to countries still at war – things which were long known to many of us.  

What we want to propose instead is that current political mobilization against racism should not target merely “individual racists” but address a larger structure that normalizes discrimination between people and erodes possibilities for potential solidarities between differently marginalised groups of people. It puts people in competition against each other in the name of policing a nation-state while damaging us all irrespective of citizenship status.

Enforcing temporariness of migrant lives

The government programme justifies tighter measures on immigration by supposedly promoting better “integration” of non-citizens, protecting “the most vulnerable people”, and “preventing abuses”. In practice, however, research to date indicates that the now proposed measures would produce more inequality between citizens and non-citizens, create hierarchies among non-citizens themselves, and hinder participation by further enforcing the temporariness of their lives.

Included in the new programme are measures which would lengthen the process of settling down in Finland. First, it proposes the requirement of a six years’ stay in Finland to be eligible for permanent residence in combination with a language test. Those with an income exceeding 40 000 euros a year would be eligible already after four years given that certain requirements are met.  

Lengthening migrants’ temporary residence in Finland increases insecurity over the future of one’s stay. Research demonstrates that creating time-limited residency statuses produces insecure and vulnerable labour since people’s residence in Finland depends on them getting a sufficient income with a work contract that fits the regulations of a residence permit in question.

Such institutionally produced insecurity is further aggravated by the proposal of making deportation possible if a holder of a residence permit issued on the basis of work has been unemployed for a period of three months without managing to get a new employment contract. Additionally, employers would be made responsible for informing the Immigration Service of the end of employment.

By extending the length of one’s permanent residency required for being eligible for Finnish citizenship from five to eight years, the government implies that one needs to work harder to get the reward of a Finnish passport. This also includes demonstrating one’s successful “integration” through not only a language test, but among other things demonstrating sufficient financial resources and a citizenship test, which is a way of disciplining migrants and making them prove themselves as deserving of citizenship.

Contrary to the idea that tighter regulations for citizenship create more incentives for migrants’ “hard work”, research shows that naturalization can become a tool for “integration” itself, that is, strengthening a sense of belonging as a subject capable of shaping and contributing to society. Scholarly work demonstrates that naturalization helps reduce informality and discrimination, and provides strong evidence that naturalization acts as a catalyst for “labor market integration”, such as, e.g., an increase in annual earnings.

Erosion of asylum

The government programme proposes several amendments that limit asylum seekers’ access to state protection. It intends to cut the annual refugee quota from 1,050 to 500. This is done when 2023 has marked the largest ever single-year increase in forced displacement since World War II.

International protection is set to become temporary in nature and the length of the international protection permits to be shortened to the minimum allowed by the EU law (i.e. to three years for a permit based on granted asylum and one year for a permit based on secondary protection). Extension of permits requires an assessment of the need for continuation of international protection.

The proposal to make international protection temporary is not new in the context of EU member states that increasingly put effort into eroding the institute of asylum. Denmark, known for some of the most racist and restrictive asylum and migration policies, already introduced refugee protection statuses that only allow refugees to stay temporarily. The policy is part of the so called “paradigm shift”, which moves refugee policy away from permanent protection and integration toward temporary protection and returning individuals “home” as soon as possible.

Research demonstrates that this legal intervention transformed the meaning and character of refugee protection previously guaranteed by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which Denmark (and Finland) signed. It worked to deny refugees basic rights as the government argued explicitly that a person’s protection status should be revoked once the need for protection is no longer there. As a result, Syrians now live with the threat of losing their protection status and being returned to Syria, a country still at war. Hundreds of Syrian refugees have already left Denmark to seek asylum in other EU countries. This production of permanent temporariness shifts the responsibility for international protection from Denmark to other EU member states. Should Finland follow a similar path?  

It has also been long known that people use different channels of regularising their stay, and that asylum seekers may use a work-based residence permit to stay in the country if the asylum application gets rejected. This is an inevitable process as people navigate bureaucratic systems and border regimes imposed on them to regularize their stay. This displays a deep interconnection of different migrant statuses and categories, contrary to the bureaucratic language that divides people into clear cut categories (e.g. migrant worker, asylum-seeker, student, family member). Far from “cheating” the system, this practice is perfectly legal and even can be considered a form of “proper integration”: in the end, people find employment and make contributions so desired by Western governments.

With the new proposal, however, those who have received a negative asylum decision would be explicitly prevented from changing lane to work-based residence. Thus, a job obtained during the asylum process would not be an obstacle to removal from the country after a negative asylum decision. In practice, this means that people who find work and contribute to society on par with citizens must be deported despite the connections they built in the country.

Research has extensively shown how the figure of an asylum seeker is racialized, that is, imagined as non-white and originating from non-Western countries. The signal the government sends, then, is that asylum seekers are not welcome to Finland even as workers and potential taxpayers. The conclusion that follows is that despite the dire need for workers to sustain an ageing society, extensively discussed in the media and the government itself, the country’s leadership would wish to deport non-white people altogether even if they found work in Finland. Simply put, by saying that Finland needs only work based migration, the governments means that they only want white workers.

In addition, the government wants to cut undocumented migrants’ access to other than urgent healthcare. Research shows that limiting access to healthcare does not prevent migration. Healthcare professionals also argue that denying essential health care to undocumented people neither prevents suffering nor saves money as delaying help only complicates further medical treatment.

Intensified social hierarchies

While the overall aim of the government plan is to tighten all forms of migration to Finland and to reduce expenditure made on “immigrants”, the proposal enforces hierarchical structures among those governed as migrants. It privileges migrants with a higher income and a higher level of education, and promises a faster permit application process for those receiving a salary exceeding 4000 euros per month.

Moreover, the government’s aim to build firmer relationship with the EU includes cooperation on strengthening the EU’s external borders and operating conditions with Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. It does so also by exploring the possibilities of using development and trade policy as a resource in creating return agreements for third-country nationals and by finding ways of returning third country nationals without a valid residence permit in Finland to another third country than their so-called “home country” – a vague concept, not always reflecting people’s subjective experiences of where one’s home country is.

Lastly, the new plan emphasizes the boundedness of the already strict and conservative notion of the family in the family reunification process, limiting it strictly to nuclear relations. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how much stricter this definition may be considering earlier cases of deportation of elderly relatives dependent on their adult children.

Establishing a life in Finland?

Our conversations with members of migrant communities support previous observations that creating enforced temporariness and prolonged waiting tightens routes toward political and social participation. After learning about the new government plans, people we talked to showed skepticism about staying in Finland as the message they received is that they are not wanted here. With harsher requirements to get a Finnish passport or even permanent residency, many talked about lack of motivation to invest time and effort in Finland, for example, by learning Finnish and establishing social networks. If the state sees them only as a temporary labour force to be used and sent away once they are not needed any more, why spending time and energy establishing a life and making longer-term plans?

In particular, the possibility of migrant workers being deported after three months’ unemployment has been received with great skepticism as it is well known that job search and recruitment process usually take much longer than three months even in highly vibrant sectors like IT work. That many migrants now plan to leave Finland is detrimental since many have been educated in Finland, have created their lives in Finland, and are acutely needed in Finland simply by virtue of living here.

Brief observations outlined above show quite the opposite effect to the supposedly desired migrant “integration” proposed in the government programme. The suggested changes will increase inequality, informality and vulnerability to exploitation as it is well documented that migration law reproduces a racially segmented and stratified labour force. However, an unintegrated, isolated, atomized and non-unionized labour force kept in a permanent state of temporariness is profitable for exploitative labour markets. Policies that enforce temporariness and insecurity create harmful social environments detrimental to society at large – not only to migrants.  

Social justice is embodied, which means that it is also spatial and part of making a place. We therefore stress the need to fight against the normalization of the divide between migrants and native citizens and the hierarchies produced in terms of those who have the right to plan and create a life in Finland. This is crucial to keeping political mobilization from becoming non-performative anti-racism, that is, when anti-racism is simply reduced to questions of reputational damage and Finland’s (not always deserved) progressive image on the world stage.

Daria Krivonos is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on race, labour, feminist politics, social reproduction and racial capitalism in the context of post-Soviet migration.

Olivia Maury is a lecturer in sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Her research interests include the entanglement of border regimes and migrant labour, processes of racialisation and the constitutive inequalities of the digitalising planetary labour market.