Employment situation of immigrants becomes clearly better only after several years

Establishing one’s career takes time; large family seen as hindrance when seeking employment

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The longer Finland’s immigrants have stayed in the country the more easily they have also found employment.
      By the year 2007 the rate of employment among the “immigration pioneers” who entered Finland between 1989 and 1993 was good. In all, 58 per cent of them were engaged in working life, against the national rate of employment of 70 per cent.
      These were among the findings of the Labour Market Integration of Immigrants study published by the City of Helsinki Urban Facts. The study followed 10,500 working-age immigrants, who had moved into Finland at the turn of 1990s, through to the year 2007. By then fourteen per cent of them were unemployed.
      Along the way the size of the followed group was reduced by 3,000 individuals. They had either entered into retirement, moved away, or died.
     
What is interesting is the fact that gradually the differences in the employment situation between men and women as well as between individuals from different countries or different age-groups melted away. Even those who initially arrived in Finland as refugees eventually caught up with the rest.
      In the course of time the stabilising of one’s career also became easier: more than half of the studied immigrants succeeded in entering into more permanent employment from temporary jobs and from the cycle of unemployment periods or training courses.
      Becoming settled manifested itself in other respects as well. In 2007, 40 per cent of those followed in the study were living as owner-occupiers and a fifth of them had completed either a professional or academic degree in Finland.
      The factor that most notably affected one’s position in working life was the size of the family. Those immigrants who had three children or fewer were more successful in finding employment than those with larger families.
      ”It seems that a family size similar to that of a typical Finnish nuclear family, with father, mother, and 1-3 children, is the most rewarding one when it comes to flourishing in the labour market”, says Annika Forsander, director of Immigration Affairs for the City of Helsinki.
      It is not just a question of mother having to stay at home to take care of the children. A large family also weakened men’s position in working life.
     
Those who came to Finland between 1989 and 1993 are in many ways a special group. Before them there were very few foreigners in Finland, and those who were here came from a small group of countries, with the United States and Britain both much more strongly represented in the mix than they are today.
      Immigration started growing in the early 1990s when the wars in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia forced people to move and brought refugees and asylum seekers even as far north as Finland. People also arrived from the former Soviet Union area, after the Ingrian Finns were awarded the status of “returning migrants”.
      The recession that hit Finland around the same time plus the employers’ still somewhat lukewarm attitudes towards migrant workers did not help with the job search.
      “With a good economic situation accompanied by the employers’ now much more positive approach towards foreigners, finding employment could be even faster”, Forsander reckons.
     
Half of Finland’s immigrants live in the capital area. At the end of last year one in ten Helsinki residents, 62,200 individuals in all, were of foreign background.
      “This has to be taken into consideration when allocating resources”, emphasises Helsinki’s Deputy Mayor Tuula Haatainen (SDP).


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Finnish enterprises are sluggish on recruitment of immigrants (28.9.2010)
  Returning migrant status for Ingrians to be abolished (19.5.2010)
  Immigrants and the difficulties of integration and getting into the cultural mainstream (8.6.2010)

See also:
  Marrying into Finland (3.8.2010)
  Helsinki: city of immigrants (2.3.2010)

Links:
  City of Helsinki Urban Facts Press Release

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