Having lived in Finland for over a year now, I have definitely begun to compose a list of ideas of how I think things should be handled when coming to Finland. Biggest one: The language(s) Granted I did come for "another reason" other than work/study so my residence is not based on any of those things AND I am also a Nordic citizen, so I don't even legally have to explain the reason why I live in Finland (but it's a romantic reason if I say so myself) so I could most likely go about my day not learning a word of Finnish. But that's not what I wish. I want to learn Finnish, because it is the official language (apart from Swedish) knowing the language opens up so many opportunities and cultural aspects. I want to obtain Finnish citizenship, and be able to vote for the next Finnish president. Yet still, when I arrived in Finland, there didn't seem to be any need for me to learn the language, at least not in the public eye of Finland (several Finnish people online say "Why would anyone want to learn Finnish, it's a difficult language and it's only spoken by 5 million people, besides we all speak English") plus when I go into stores and speak Finnish, there is still the risk that they switch to English (although it doesn't happen as often as it once did) I had to show that I want to learn Finnish, because it never seemed there was any obligation to learn it If I had any political influence in Finland, I would make Finnish language learning compulsary for immigrants arriving in Finland, based on their reason and length of residence. If a person arrives in Finland with the intention of staying for a long time (aka not moving back after studies end) then Finnish studies should be started within 3 months of arriving in Finland, and if they came to Finland for a newly started job etc. then the job should allow the person to partake in those language studies
Valid points. Government is doing a lot to keep Finnish culture, people and society thriving but this law could have unwanted consequences. The difference between a well integrated working immigrant and a fresh asylum seeker is drastic. Most of us want the first ones continue enjoy Finland in its full and control mass access for latter. Good job again on a great perspective!
I think the idea of this law is to squeeze immigrants and drop people who have no real desire to stay here. Hell, I wouldn't really want to stay because I think the situation in Finland is really apathetic and i'm native. But my family is here, and there is really no better country on the other side of the lawn. Some will certainly aspire to Sweden and seek a more permanent place of residence there, but even there are major problems. I have a friend though who came from Afghanistan as a refugee and he has managed to become a citizen in 5 years. Has a wife, child, car, proper education for a technical job and he can speak finnish fluently. He came from nothing and managed to strive trough our system. We need more people like him and like you Chico who have a positive effect to our country. I don't think this law is really an issue for you Chico and I bet nobody is going to get thrown out in 3 months anyway, because our bureaucratic system is so slow. 😅
Honestly, looking at how my foreign (EU cutizens) friends trying to apply for jobs, the barriers to employment are perhaps even more so in the requirements and biases at the workplaces resulting in unnecessary overlooking of foreign professionals rather than the legislation alone. Or the legislation would not pose an issue if the work market wasn't so discriminatory. But I haven't read through the proposal to know all the details. The news media rarely is reliable in presenting new legislative drafts reliably. Heck, sometimes the background research in the ministries which the new proposals are based upon are of quite low quality.
3 months is plenty of time to find a job in Finland. It might not be a job in your field, but you can always get a job a cleaner, security guard, telemarketer, sales person, taxi driver, food delivery person etc... Plenty of easy jobs you can find in 3 days even! No-one is getting kicked out if they're ready to hustle. It can be a temporary job for you while you keep searching for a job more in your field.
I have never in my life found a job in 3 months, not even in my home country (and many basic jobs won't even take you if you are overqualified because they think you will leave at the first opportunity).
@@kathrinkaefer You know you can just omit qualifications right? It's wrong to fake having a master's diploma, but nothing wrong to just skip telling you have one. Besides, many basic jobs have a huge turnover to they're not turning people away easily. Warehouse worker is another rather instant job to get. If you live in a small town with no work you gotta move either way.
Three months is more than enough to find a job maybe at a restaurant, a warehouse or other low-skill labour. If you're a specialist for example, it can very easily take longer and that's before even considering that the recruitment phase may take several months too. With my current job which isn't even that specialised, it took over two months from application to me walking into the office for my first day. Three months is nothing.
I disagree about how big of a turnoff this would be for foreign workers considering moving into Finland. Let's be honest here: there's hardly any attraction anyway. By far the biggest issue influencing the attractiveness of Finland for foreign specialists is taxation, taxation and taxation. The highly educated specialists that Finland needs, make a lot of money, which means that with Finland's overly progressive income taxation system, they would not receive as much money as net salary as they would for example in Sweden or in the Netherlands. So, because of that they will not prefer choose to work in Finland. It's simple as that. They don't care about free public healthcare because they can afford the private one, and they don't care if there is a requirement to find a new job within 3 or 6 months of unemployment because they will find a new position easily. They just care about how will they be doing financially. For us to have any chances at competing with our fellow EU member states, we HAVE to lower the taxation of foreign skilled workers to be lower than the competition - if we don't, we will not attract enough skilled workers to come here. Finland already has disadvantages which we can't change, like our location in the far north, cold winters with next to none sunlight, and long distances. Let's remember that in EU the workforce can move freely to any member state, so there is already a 300+ million pool of working age people, that are free to move to work in Finland any time they want.
Indeed, very true! Those who put forth this messy law-proposal really tried to score some domestic politics points that have nothing to do with the real problem of declining birth-rates and lack of highly skilled professionals.
issue is that when again workers are needed, new ones will be recruited who need to learn Finnish for 2 to 3 years paid by tax money. Keep the ones who have already integrated for a bit longer time, and if they want to stay longer than 6 months, then maybe let them be but on their own expense.
There are many obstacles in hiring foreign born people due to attitudes in the working culture in many Finnish companies, Finns generally hire people they can identify with, they assume this reduces the risk when hiring. I have been in situations where i have left for another job due to lack of trust and avoid being laid off.
Right, Chico, sounds like a law put together to satisfy some old-fashioned retired farmers from Northern Karelia, where they never are able to keep any highly skilled workers, even if they are native Finns. There is that hugh gap in education and outlooks. They are against everything that wasn't there 100 years ago. They look back at times when phones and doctors weren't needed as long as they could make moonshine without interference, and use it and sauna for every problem. But they do have votes, too, and the "basic-Finns-party" needs those votes. I think there will be no actual cases of denying highly skilled workers the right to live and look for work, especially if they've already have learned Finnish enough to do the jobs - it just sounds scary and ridiculous. I'm happy that the dumb proposal is discussed, though. The real problems get high-lighted. The ghettoes, the illegal arms, the drugs, and the fake refugees, that Sweden hasn't managed well. The efforts should really be to keep asylum-seekers on track, with programs which can give them grounded hope for the future, and never let criminals blend in among them who actually have good reasons for applying for asylum. That's where Sweden naively (?) went wrong. A modest level of Finnish is essential for citizenship, IMHO, and in addition good Finnish for certain professions, as it always have been in Finland, with different levels of language exams and tests in different forms. Every country should require that, and Sweden should realise that, too. But again Finland has to show the good examples, like in many other trail-blazer issues.
The current government is very bad for Finland, but we live in democracy and politically illiterate/poorly educated people have the same democratic rights as politically literate/highly educated people. The main problem here is the True Finns party which makes possible all of this lunacy. RKP is probably the best (least bad if you will) party in the government, but they are there just to protect the status of Swedish language in Finnish society and are pretty fine with the bad policies pushed by others. They did recently call for increased immigration of skilled workers, but the other parties in the government, especially True Finns won't have it. In the future things will be even worse when misinformation ridden social media becomes the main source of politics for the major population and quality journalism is totally gone when almost nobody has the attention span or literacy level to read anything educational. We can get depressed about that, or we can try to feel happy about the few things that are still good in the World... ...the glass is half empty or full...
Good comment! I think the liberal project has failed in its principles, failed in a sense it is exhibiting distorted representative thinking leading to lack of recognition of needs and anxieties of diverse set of people and identities. I include the conservatives to the diverse groups as well. The masses have been, are and will be mostly politically illiterate - due to many reasons and I am not saying this to diminish anyone. Political illiteracy and apathy has many reasons; sense of not being recognized (Political theorist Charles Taylor writes about politics of recognition), anxiety of losing the current group identity, not having the luxury to concentrate on issues outside of the immediate daily issues and needs etc. I think you hit the nail on the head with RKP! They are doing liberal politics while heavily engaging with their voter group, instead of being just “representatives”, they are more advocates than any other political party in Finland (Reading suggestion: Nadia Urbinati’s Representative advocacy). PS could have tried the same in their own context, but instead they fell in to the populist pitfalls with inconsistent politics, untrustworthiness, and other classic populist characteristics leading to short sighted solutions to complex problems. Populism is an inevitable shadow of democracy. Yes, the representational system may efficiently filter out the passionate and emotional aspects of direct participational democracy, but leads towards distanced representation, and therefore distorted representational thinking, without true connection or understanding of the voter’s anxieties and needs. Instead of polarizing conservatives/progressives, liberals/illiberals, in my perhaps naive opinion we should take a look to the representative system itself, and how have we got to the point where people do not feel they are being represented and therefore leaning towards populists and alternative medias. In the setting where liberals and illiberals are positioned against each other, I think both should be critically evaluated.
What a comment... I'm quite sure there are a lot of people in Finland who don't vote for PS who are very politically literate and there are definitely a lot of people who vote for left wing parties who aren't politically literate. I get really mad every time I read comments such as this because it really only helps PS if people say their voters are poorly educated or politically illiterate. This demeaning way of talking about a voterbase sadly has the effect of making them a "victim group" and sympathetic to many people rather than a real threat to anything. It also feeds into their rhetoric of being suppressed and victimized. Also this kind of mentality completely goes in line with what PS are trying to say with their populism: That these "elites" (highly educated, well off people) look down on the masses and think they're better than them. I really hope you don't actually think people who vote for PS are all just some uneducated dimwits and start taking people with differing opinions seriously. And in case it needs to be said: I haven't and I most likely won't ever vote for PS. What comes to this government being bad, I don't think any of the previous or possible future ones would do any better. We wouldn't be in this situation if the previous governments had done a good job in the first place. The previous government set in place many of the things that we are currently going through and the decisions this government makes will be seen best after the next has already replaced this one.
Like you would know? Current government is what may save Finland, no more, no less. The leftist parties have almost destroyed Finland and there is no point trying to solve ANY other problems unless Finlands economy works. Without funds it is useless to plan anything as the plans can not be carried through. And immigration is part of the problem and immigration requirements has to be tightened. But all this is some foreign language to leftists. They think that thinking nicely and helping the whole world our own problems will magically disappear. True Finns party is the only party in Finland that bases it's politics on realities instead of ideologies and dreams. It is the most important party in Finland at the moment and also Finland's only hope. It is not that they could fix all them selves, it is more that they force other parties to take the realities in consideration also. Without them we would be in the same sh_t hole as Swedes. Sweden as we knew it is gone. And it is VERY difficult if not possible to fix it anymore.
The populism always lives on the opposite side people claim. Crying out populism is just one more way to cover own inadequacy and illiteracy on the matters that are being handled. SDP is probably the most populist party in Finland and that correlates the illiteracy of the voters. The voters do not understand the basic politics and macro economy so they vote for the parties that promise everyone good and nice things. And that is done without having a clue how to fund all that. THAT is populism in it's purest and most dangerous form.
@@SanteriAT I don't debate politics anymore (waste of time). I say what I think and that's it. I don't care much about what other people think. As for the previous government goes, in my opinion they did pretty well considering the challenging pandemic they had to deal with.
Having lived in Finland for over a year now, I have definitely begun to compose a list of ideas of how I think things should be handled when coming to Finland. Biggest one: The language(s) Granted I did come for "another reason" other than work/study so my residence is not based on any of those things AND I am also a Nordic citizen, so I don't even legally have to explain the reason why I live in Finland (but it's a romantic reason if I say so myself) so I could most likely go about my day not learning a word of Finnish. But that's not what I wish. I want to learn Finnish, because it is the official language (apart from Swedish) knowing the language opens up so many opportunities and cultural aspects. I want to obtain Finnish citizenship, and be able to vote for the next Finnish president.
Yet still, when I arrived in Finland, there didn't seem to be any need for me to learn the language, at least not in the public eye of Finland (several Finnish people online say "Why would anyone want to learn Finnish, it's a difficult language and it's only spoken by 5 million people, besides we all speak English") plus when I go into stores and speak Finnish, there is still the risk that they switch to English (although it doesn't happen as often as it once did)
I had to show that I want to learn Finnish, because it never seemed there was any obligation to learn it
If I had any political influence in Finland, I would make Finnish language learning compulsary for immigrants arriving in Finland, based on their reason and length of residence. If a person arrives in Finland with the intention of staying for a long time (aka not moving back after studies end) then Finnish studies should be started within 3 months of arriving in Finland, and if they came to Finland for a newly started job etc. then the job should allow the person to partake in those language studies
Valid points. Government is doing a lot to keep Finnish culture, people and society thriving but this law could have unwanted consequences. The difference between a well integrated working immigrant and a fresh asylum seeker is drastic. Most of us want the first ones continue enjoy Finland in its full and control mass access for latter. Good job again on a great perspective!
I think the idea of this law is to squeeze immigrants and drop people who have no real desire to stay here. Hell, I wouldn't really want to stay because I think the situation in Finland is really apathetic and i'm native. But my family is here, and there is really no better country on the other side of the lawn. Some will certainly aspire to Sweden and seek a more permanent place of residence there, but even there are major problems.
I have a friend though who came from Afghanistan as a refugee and he has managed to become a citizen in 5 years. Has a wife, child, car, proper education for a technical job and he can speak finnish fluently. He came from nothing and managed to strive trough our system. We need more people like him and like you Chico who have a positive effect to our country. I don't think this law is really an issue for you Chico and I bet nobody is going to get thrown out in 3 months anyway, because our bureaucratic system is so slow. 😅
In Sweden there are far worse problems. Economy is much easier to fix than what's broken in Sweden.
Lovely seeing such a well thought-through stance on an issue. Wishing you the best Chico.
Honestly, looking at how my foreign (EU cutizens) friends trying to apply for jobs, the barriers to employment are perhaps even more so in the requirements and biases at the workplaces resulting in unnecessary overlooking of foreign professionals rather than the legislation alone. Or the legislation would not pose an issue if the work market wasn't so discriminatory. But I haven't read through the proposal to know all the details. The news media rarely is reliable in presenting new legislative drafts reliably. Heck, sometimes the background research in the ministries which the new proposals are based upon are of quite low quality.
3 months is plenty of time to find a job in Finland. It might not be a job in your field, but you can always get a job a cleaner, security guard, telemarketer, sales person, taxi driver, food delivery person etc... Plenty of easy jobs you can find in 3 days even! No-one is getting kicked out if they're ready to hustle. It can be a temporary job for you while you keep searching for a job more in your field.
I have never in my life found a job in 3 months, not even in my home country (and many basic jobs won't even take you if you are overqualified because they think you will leave at the first opportunity).
I’m genuinely not sure if you listened to the video. Also, you have to be working in the same field you moved here for.
@@kathrinkaefer You know you can just omit qualifications right? It's wrong to fake having a master's diploma, but nothing wrong to just skip telling you have one. Besides, many basic jobs have a huge turnover to they're not turning people away easily. Warehouse worker is another rather instant job to get. If you live in a small town with no work you gotta move either way.
Three months is more than enough to find a job maybe at a restaurant, a warehouse or other low-skill labour. If you're a specialist for example, it can very easily take longer and that's before even considering that the recruitment phase may take several months too. With my current job which isn't even that specialised, it took over two months from application to me walking into the office for my first day. Three months is nothing.
I disagree about how big of a turnoff this would be for foreign workers considering moving into Finland. Let's be honest here: there's hardly any attraction anyway. By far the biggest issue influencing the attractiveness of Finland for foreign specialists is taxation, taxation and taxation. The highly educated specialists that Finland needs, make a lot of money, which means that with Finland's overly progressive income taxation system, they would not receive as much money as net salary as they would for example in Sweden or in the Netherlands. So, because of that they will not prefer choose to work in Finland. It's simple as that. They don't care about free public healthcare because they can afford the private one, and they don't care if there is a requirement to find a new job within 3 or 6 months of unemployment because they will find a new position easily. They just care about how will they be doing financially.
For us to have any chances at competing with our fellow EU member states, we HAVE to lower the taxation of foreign skilled workers to be lower than the competition - if we don't, we will not attract enough skilled workers to come here. Finland already has disadvantages which we can't change, like our location in the far north, cold winters with next to none sunlight, and long distances. Let's remember that in EU the workforce can move freely to any member state, so there is already a 300+ million pool of working age people, that are free to move to work in Finland any time they want.
Indeed, very true! Those who put forth this messy law-proposal really tried to score some domestic politics points that have nothing to do with the real problem of declining birth-rates and lack of highly skilled professionals.
issue is that when again workers are needed, new ones will be recruited who need to learn Finnish for 2 to 3 years paid by tax money. Keep the ones who have already integrated for a bit longer time, and if they want to stay longer than 6 months, then maybe let them be but on their own expense.
This problem may affect EU citizens?
I saw you with your sign in the YLE morning news
There are many obstacles in hiring foreign born people due to attitudes in the working culture in many Finnish companies, Finns generally hire people they can identify with, they assume this reduces the risk when hiring. I have been in situations where i have left for another job due to lack of trust and avoid being laid off.
I couldn't agree more 👍
Indeed. It has and will do harm for Finland.
Bro has milked this shit for so long
Right, Chico, sounds like a law put together to satisfy some old-fashioned retired farmers from Northern Karelia, where they never are able to keep any highly skilled workers, even if they are native Finns. There is that hugh gap in education and outlooks. They are against everything that wasn't there 100 years ago. They look back at times when phones and doctors weren't needed as long as they could make moonshine without interference, and use it and sauna for every problem. But they do have votes, too, and the "basic-Finns-party" needs those votes.
I think there will be no actual cases of denying highly skilled workers the right to live and look for work, especially if they've already have learned Finnish enough to do the jobs - it just sounds scary and ridiculous. I'm happy that the dumb proposal is discussed, though. The real problems get high-lighted. The ghettoes, the illegal arms, the drugs, and the fake refugees, that Sweden hasn't managed well. The efforts should really be to keep asylum-seekers on track, with programs which can give them grounded hope for the future, and never let criminals blend in among them who actually have good reasons for applying for asylum. That's where Sweden naively (?) went wrong.
A modest level of Finnish is essential for citizenship, IMHO, and in addition good Finnish for certain professions, as it always have been in Finland, with different levels of language exams and tests in different forms. Every country should require that, and Sweden should realise that, too. But again Finland has to show the good examples, like in many other trail-blazer issues.
The current government is very bad for Finland, but we live in democracy and politically illiterate/poorly educated people have the same democratic rights as politically literate/highly educated people. The main problem here is the True Finns party which makes possible all of this lunacy. RKP is probably the best (least bad if you will) party in the government, but they are there just to protect the status of Swedish language in Finnish society and are pretty fine with the bad policies pushed by others. They did recently call for increased immigration of skilled workers, but the other parties in the government, especially True Finns won't have it.
In the future things will be even worse when misinformation ridden social media becomes the main source of politics for the major population and quality journalism is totally gone when almost nobody has the attention span or literacy level to read anything educational. We can get depressed about that, or we can try to feel happy about the few things that are still good in the World... ...the glass is half empty or full...
Good comment! I think the liberal project has failed in its principles, failed in a sense it is exhibiting distorted representative thinking leading to lack of recognition of needs and anxieties of diverse set of people and identities. I include the conservatives to the diverse groups as well.
The masses have been, are and will be mostly politically illiterate - due to many reasons and I am not saying this to diminish anyone. Political illiteracy and apathy has many reasons; sense of not being recognized (Political theorist Charles Taylor writes about politics of recognition), anxiety of losing the current group identity, not having the luxury to concentrate on issues outside of the immediate daily issues and needs etc.
I think you hit the nail on the head with RKP! They are doing liberal politics while heavily engaging with their voter group, instead of being just “representatives”, they are more advocates than any other political party in Finland (Reading suggestion: Nadia Urbinati’s Representative advocacy). PS could have tried the same in their own context, but instead they fell in to the populist pitfalls with inconsistent politics, untrustworthiness, and other classic populist characteristics leading to short sighted solutions to complex problems.
Populism is an inevitable shadow of democracy. Yes, the representational system may efficiently filter out the passionate and emotional aspects of direct participational democracy, but leads towards distanced representation, and therefore distorted representational thinking, without true connection or understanding of the voter’s anxieties and needs.
Instead of polarizing conservatives/progressives, liberals/illiberals, in my perhaps naive opinion we should take a look to the representative system itself, and how have we got to the point where people do not feel they are being represented and therefore leaning towards populists and alternative medias. In the setting where liberals and illiberals are positioned against each other, I think both should be critically evaluated.
What a comment... I'm quite sure there are a lot of people in Finland who don't vote for PS who are very politically literate and there are definitely a lot of people who vote for left wing parties who aren't politically literate. I get really mad every time I read comments such as this because it really only helps PS if people say their voters are poorly educated or politically illiterate. This demeaning way of talking about a voterbase sadly has the effect of making them a "victim group" and sympathetic to many people rather than a real threat to anything. It also feeds into their rhetoric of being suppressed and victimized.
Also this kind of mentality completely goes in line with what PS are trying to say with their populism: That these "elites" (highly educated, well off people) look down on the masses and think they're better than them.
I really hope you don't actually think people who vote for PS are all just some uneducated dimwits and start taking people with differing opinions seriously.
And in case it needs to be said: I haven't and I most likely won't ever vote for PS.
What comes to this government being bad, I don't think any of the previous or possible future ones would do any better. We wouldn't be in this situation if the previous governments had done a good job in the first place. The previous government set in place many of the things that we are currently going through and the decisions this government makes will be seen best after the next has already replaced this one.
Like you would know? Current government is what may save Finland, no more, no less. The leftist parties have almost destroyed Finland and there is no point trying to solve ANY other problems unless Finlands economy works. Without funds it is useless to plan anything as the plans can not be carried through. And immigration is part of the problem and immigration requirements has to be tightened. But all this is some foreign language to leftists. They think that thinking nicely and helping the whole world our own problems will magically disappear. True Finns party is the only party in Finland that bases it's politics on realities instead of ideologies and dreams. It is the most important party in Finland at the moment and also Finland's only hope. It is not that they could fix all them selves, it is more that they force other parties to take the realities in consideration also. Without them we would be in the same sh_t hole as Swedes. Sweden as we knew it is gone. And it is VERY difficult if not possible to fix it anymore.
The populism always lives on the opposite side people claim. Crying out populism is just one more way to cover own inadequacy and illiteracy on the matters that are being handled. SDP is probably the most populist party in Finland and that correlates the illiteracy of the voters. The voters do not understand the basic politics and macro economy so they vote for the parties that promise everyone good and nice things. And that is done without having a clue how to fund all that. THAT is populism in it's purest and most dangerous form.
@@SanteriAT I don't debate politics anymore (waste of time). I say what I think and that's it. I don't care much about what other people think. As for the previous government goes, in my opinion they did pretty well considering the challenging pandemic they had to deal with.