Even top-notch skills are sometimes not good enough
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By Laura Pekonen
Meet Brett Young, a highly-trained 35-year-old Canadian man. He wears a dark suit, a white shirt, with his company ID card hanging around his neck. He sips from a large latte.
Young has a master’s degree in Finnish and Russian history from the University of Toronto. He has lived in Finland for more than seven years. He works for a Finnish IT company. He is married to a Finnish woman and is the father of a young child.
"You can interview me in English or Finnish", he points out.
Young sounds like the perfect immigrant - the very kind that Finland should encourage to come here, so that the country would not grow too old and become too impoverished.
And there is not even any need to try to entice him: he wants to stay here and pay taxes, get soaked in slush, and drink lattes made with low-fat milk.
Young’s citizenship application was rejected last spring.
"I had come into the country on a work visa in 1998, but after I got married, I got a family visa in 2003. The reason for the rejection was that I had not had a family visa for the necessary four years", Young says.
He would not even have tried to apply for citizenship ahead of time, if an official at the Directorate of Immigration had not hinted that in some cases, with luck, the application could be approved if he says that he switched from one visa to another because of his family situation.
Luck was not on Young’s side. The next time that he can apply for Finnish citizenship is in 2007, when he will have been in Finland for nine years. Until then, whenever he returns to Finland from abroad he has to stand in the long queue for arrivals from outside the Schengen zone. His wife and daughter can walk right through.
If Young needs to renew his visa, the police will hold his passport for several weeks. If he has to travel for work during that time, he has to apply in writing to get his own passport back.
But wait a minute. Why does Young even want to be the citizen of a country that clearly does not want him? Surely other work would be available at an international IT company.
Young laughs. The original reason was Heikki "Hexi" Riihiranta, Ilkka Sinisalo, and Reijo Ruotsalainen. The three played hockey for the NHL, and the Canadian boy was a big fan of the game. That is what got him so interested in the land of hard consonants.
"I have an affection for this country and I want to raise my children here. Applying for citizenship is a sign of respect."
Young has also shown respect by studying to learn the Finnish language, and by passing a language test, in which he needed to understand a decision handed down by municipal authorities on the establishment of a golf course (EUR 70). He has passed the test for a Finnish driving licence (EUR 300), including a test on driving in icy conditions. He has submitted a citizenship application in which he had to list every trip abroad that he has made during seven years (this cost another EUR 400).
Young has patiently surfed on the web site of the Directorate of Immigration, where readers are told not to call. He has applied for and received visas at a police station, where the issue of Time magazine in the waiting room bears a sticker "Aliens’ copy".
He has also spent hours sitting at the immigration police in Malmi, where the staff members are so surly that he suspects that the most gifted could get jobs as waiters at Helsinki restaurants. In spite of this, Young has kept a sense of humour about it all; he refuses to blame anybody.
"Finnish officials are equally cold to everyone. There are simply no traditions with immigration here. The historical attitude is to push the commies across the border", Young says.
Brett Young sees a conflict in Finnish policy toward foreigners: in order to live as they have lived before, Finns have to stop living as they have lived before.
Finns would do well to stop being afraid of foreigners. He points out that if Finns want to maintain the present standard of living, foreign labour will be necessary. "If elderly Finns want to eat cinnamon buns at the old folks' home, there are not enough Finns to take care of them."
Young feels that political parties are powerless to make any changes, because the average voter does not want a flow of immigrants into Finland. He is not sure if the attitude will change even with time.
"Finnish young people want to see the world, but they also want to come back home to a place where everything is the same, and where people all look the same."
Young predicts that if forced to do so, Finland will create some kind of a Gastarbeiter system, in which poor, cheap workers are taken into the country for periods of a couple of years. Another possibility is that visa requirements will be eased gradually for those who are really wanted here, and who do not have the patience to queue for their passports in some office for weeks at a time.
Thought will then have to be given to what kind of an attitude should be taken toward those who actually want to stay.
Perhaps Young will be lucky two years from now.
"The Finnish state needs only a little bit of convincing that I am needed here", he says.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 11.12.2005
More on this subject:
 Who are the newcomers that Finland wants?
LAURA PEKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
laura.pekonen@hs.fi
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