Being an immigrant in Finland

Yesterday we were drinking in a park with Anu and Elaine, and later Jarkko and Otava joined us. It was a lovely evening and Koff park has a great toilet, and there were huge hot air balloons flying over us.

We talked, among other things, about living in Finland as an immigrant. In fact we were talking only about immigrants from civilized countries, and the trend nowadays is to call them expats, but I am still resisting that word.

I realized that it is true, as Elaine puts it in her blog, that "trying to explain how Finland differs for residents as opposed to tourists to the newly arrived is a chore since you either sound bitter or are constantly doubting your own experience of everything in a miasma of cultural relativism and personal baggage". I also realized that on some level both myself and other people consider my immigration experience exceptional, but I don't quite understand why. But I am, indeed, constantly doubting my experience, when explaining things to new immigrants. They are doubting it too.

Weird. It all went fairly smoothly, even though rather slowly on the bureaucratic front. It was a bit exceptional from the beginning because I did not come here because of a Finnish spouse, like most Western immigrants seem to. But otherwise... Came on a student visa, had no trouble with the univeristy bureaucracy, had no trouble learning Finnish, had no trouble meeting people - at least no more trouble than anywhere else. Occasionally met some people who hated foreigners, but did not think much of them. Occasionally had a bit of trouble with the immigration authorities when I was studying and working full-time, because they decided that they couldn't give me a student residence permit because I was not studying enough, and couldn't give me a worker residence permit because I hadn't graduated yet, but in those cases they told me that the situation can be resolved by taking a few more tests at the univeristy and I went and took tests, whether I needed them or not. I realize of course that my expectations of both immigration authorities and xenophobic people are quite a bit lower than most westerners', but even if we take this into account immigrating here was still fairly easy.

It seems to me that positive experiences of immigrating to Finland tend to be dismissed both by immigrants and Finns. The web forum where immigrants congregate tends to concentrate on negative issues, which is quite understandable in that the people tend to talk about things that bother them, but this also gives new people a skewed view of Finland, because the people who have integrated well are for the most part absent from that forum.

Once a student organization of which I was a rather active member decided to organize an event where department's foreign students would talk about their experiences coming to Finland. I wasn't invited to speak. When afterwards I asked the organizers why, an expression appeared on their faces that made it quite clear that the idea did not occur to them, and they said something like "but you've been here for so long... you are one of us... you speak Finnish". (I'd been here for 4 years or so by that point.) I understand the organizers in that they had probably heard all about my immigration experience already, but the other foreigners could have benefitted from it. Foreigners get an undeservedly bleak picture of Finland if only the people who have not integrated in the Finnish society are considered real foreigners and are listened to as such.

Anyway... In the unlikely event that any new immigrant is reading this: you can make it here, and learn the language, and meet people, etc. A lot of the problems that other foreigners are talking about are real, but for the most part you can overcome them. An there is a lot of us leading perfectly normal lives here - we usually just don't get invited to to speak at the foreigner events, and are not active enough to speak out by ourselves.