 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I'm so happy that we had a soup and salad for lunch. So you actually look relatively awake instead of a meaty stew or something like that. We could only imagine. Anyway, I'm happy to be here and happy. Thank you for the invitation. The first half of the previous presentation, I would say more or less represents also the situation in Finland. There might be some minor details regarding the latter part of the previous presentation. I can't really say because such studies have not yet been conducted here. So I'll be giving you a little bit of background on the Finnish case in general because I presume that most of you have restricted knowledge about it and then we'll move on to the refugee and asylum issues and I'll talk in brief about some research that we have done and then I'll make some quiet basic suggestions for how to proceed. Now in order to understand the migration situation in Finland we have to remember that within the European context and why also not more broadly Finland is a rather recent immigration society in the sense that only after the end of the Cold War the immigration started to grow in here, but it has grown ever since. So in a way we share somewhat similar recent history in comparison to countries like Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and so on, which also received a fair amount of incoming migrants since about the beginning of the 1990s. Now again, it matters where you are. A simple truth of life that we are not randomly located on this planet but we happen to be in a particular place and as often is the case the majority of migrants do come from close by. That's also the case here, especially from the territories of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Estonia in particular, but else will also from Western Europe. Until today the main reasons of entry to this country have been family related, international marriage being one significant feature, ethnic returnies from close by regions, refugees, labour migrants and students. Now that's about incoming issues. The outgoing issues is a different story. There are great differences between different nationalities regarding their tendency to move out from Finland. Quite simply said it goes so that if the living conditions in your country of origin are poorer to much poorer than in Finland your probability to stay here for longer is much higher and vice versa. If we think about Finnish both migration and migrant integration policy in broad strokes we can say that Finland until today has not yet developed a single holistic type of vision of what is its part in terms of global mobilities. We do have had and have had already for some time pretty specific policies in certain areas. For example regarding certain type of labour mobility, regarding refugee and asylum and regarding student mobility but for the rest it works I would say somewhat more retrospectively. So you look at what happened and then you think that you know what to work with that. In terms of migrant integration policy it works in a different way and that is that there's been somewhat systematic migrant integration policy especially starting from local level maybe from the mid 1990s onwards and then being more systematised in the 2000s. Initially it was aimed only at refugee and certain type of ethnic return migration but since the 2010 we could say that it's been applied more broadly among the whole of the migrant population. And a key feature here as well as elsewhere is the high level of politicisation on migrant related issues during the past five plus years. With the rise of the Finns or the True Finns party in particular both in municipal power as well as in national power today in government has meant that migration is especially refugee policies have been under much debate which heated up very much last autumn and a colleague of mine a political scientist who on a regular basis follows international media says that there's one thing that distinguishes Finnish media especially on asylum related questions and it is that unlike in other countries we haven't stopped talking about it. So you cannot open a major daily Finnish newspaper without several times of week having front page news on whatever that has to do with the current asylum situation. Now here again if we think about the little change over the past 25 years here we have people by their country of kind of like by their continent of birth the blue one being Europe the reddish one mainly referring to former Soviet territories we do see that their share has remained about the same but otherwise we see increasing migration both from especially from Asia. Now this data very recent from last week is telling about then about in particular of asylum seekers which have what have been the major asylum seekers in Finland over the past three years. So first if we look at the numbers in 2014 three thousand five three thousand six hundred fifty one two thousand fifteen thirty two thousand four hundred seventy six and this year up to last week four thousand four hundred eighty one okay it simply says that there were many more last year but otherwise the picture remains fairly fairly similar Iraq Somalia Afghanistan more or less among the the top three four countries all the time Syria has been growing up and I'll return to this in a minute. Here you see the situation in Finland week by week of last year so you see the pretty quick rise from late summer to early to December. Now as in Sweden so we also do have a small number of UNHCR quota refugees or resettled refugees that have been taken to Finland and you know they kind of like follow their own path in many respects when they enter the enter their new life in here. These are the quotas 750 plus during the last 15 years being the quotas was put a little bit higher for the past two years because of the Syrian crisis but I'd like to know that these quotas have not been filled every year so the actual numbers are somewhat lower and then talking about the asylum seekers to which I just showed some figures before so it's been in the range from one thousand to four thousand individual during the past 25 years with the exception of last year more or less there have been some small deviances from this one and of last year about three about two out of three individuals came from Iraq the other major groups were then Afghanistan Somalia and Syria and prior to last before last last autumn so somewhat under 50 000 individuals all together either as quota refugees or asylum grantees have come to Finland. Now otherwise the majority of these individuals families whatever they are are concentrated in the Helsinki capital region now if you take the metro some 15 kilometers east from here eastern Helsinki is one of the major relocation areas because of availability of housing basically of affordable housing and city sponsored social housing in those areas. Now unemployment has been on a much higher level than among other migrant groups and we are talking about really high levels so that we're talking about more than 50 percent of the so-called active workforce being unemployed but we have to remember that due to the reasons that we're also identified in the previous talk these people are in a less advantaged position in many respects but their situation does get better over time and it does get significantly better over time but still it does not come close well not too close anyway of the majority population situation so there are many issues that and still also some open questions I think issues of human capital are quite central in this respect because we have to remember that if you enter a new society as a migrant let's say you know a generic migrant not of a particular type you tend to begin your working life career in a rather basic jobs that don't where you don't need that much either linguistic skills or or previously acquired work skills and this particular segment of finished labor market where you don't need much skills and other ones has been significantly reduced in the number of workplaces in that over the past about 20-25 years again so there is a bottleneck in the finished labor market in how to enter it and this may then have a long-term consequences for the individuals and questions who would benefit from this now and let's take another twist and return to this sort of politicization of immigration so from about the from about 10 years back we saw an increasing social mobilization around among people who were opposing especially refugee policy in Finland and refugee other refugee related issues broadly speaking refugees here that then became manifested as a political movement then around the year 2010 and what is particular about this first a social online movement now a true political force in Finnish society is that it's especially not only refugees but Somali refugees who are the largest so-called visible minority in this country and the Islamic religion that are the sort of main targets of this community that means and why I'm taking this up that there is increasing how would I say acceptance of showing off your prejudices even if not always in public then you know it being somehow acceptable in certain segments of Finnish society that we may presume are by no means beneficials for the individuals in question okay now we have been by we I mean Finland in generic terms again seeing myself also some extent as part of that as a voter and as a citizen so but in de facto referring to certain policies that have been implemented during the course of this year so we are creating problems to ourselves problems which would not have existed in this way had the world taken a different path but which probably will need some reconsideration at some stage so in terms of of refugee residence permit applications one key document that the Finnish immigration service has has to do about their analysis of the countries of origin and it was in this context that some of the the the main origin countries of asylum seekers coming to Finland were declared safer not safe but safer in comparison to the previous analysis and this has to do with Iraq for instance and we have also seen the the results of these policy changes in so that that whereas before sorry I can't recall now the exact figures but it's in this direction that if previously let's us say one third of the applications to about to or about one half of the popular of the applications received a positive reply from the viewpoint of the of the applicant now we are somewhere down to 10 to 20 percent so there's been a true and very remarkable reduction in the number of of approved applications now this is of course an administrative thing to do this there's no doubt about that but this takes simultaneously place with the factual situation that there are rather restricted possibilities of return so it's quite likely and everybody seems to be more or less of the same opinion on this who know about these things that it is will lead to a relatively quick a rise of the number of undocumented migrants in Finland that means basically those who were seeking asylum but were not granted it but don't really have another anywhere to go okay so leaving these people in a vulnerable position this is a thing that is in process now there's a bit of a speculation but we don't know the outcome yet then other restrictions in what I call here now sort of generically refugee law not to make it too difficult for you so there have been restrictions on family reunification regarding the the the sort of amounts of money that you need to have our salary that you need to have so that you can support your family and these are considered by people in this field and I think also if we look at the current employment and income figures of refugee populations it seems pretty evident that we will have an increasing number of of those who have been granted the right to stay here in Finland but who will not in practice have any chance for family reunification okay so we may question that what this will bring about and the answer is pretty obvious it will bring about all kinds of well personal or bad feelings sorrow maybe at some stage is even a tragic family outcomes but in in other words it will bring about mental stress for this individual who are already more pressed from before may lead to people having different kinds of social problems more and and and so on okay and I would just like to why I took this up because this is a concrete policy changes that have been done very recently and at least to me this seems to be the sort of pretty straightforward outcomes that at some level will will come out of this now currently we do have a we've finished one one project on unaccompanied refugee minors at our institute where we basically figured out that the reception system generally works quite well but there are serious problems in in public authorities communication with each other okay now again the situation will change because the numbers grew quite significantly last year so this was before the crisis another study that is ongoing so we don't have the results yet but I want to bring it up because it will bring out some quite unique data it's a comparative study between Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark where we look at the integration outcome of individuals who are about 10 years after their arrival that will be based on Nordic register data you know similar that the study that was referred to earlier and when the results come out I believe that by next year from maybe about a year from now we already do have some preliminary results that will strengthen our understanding of that and then we do have currently and a study that looks at the the factual resettlement of asylum grantees from the from the reception centers to Finnish municipalities that has been a very big debate especially among professionals here in Finland but we'll see how that will turn out okay that was just some little bit of marketing now what is the way forward well if we look in terms of integration as was part of the title of this panel it's quite obvious that we would need to provide opportunities for education be the language education or recognition of previous studies both issues that were also mentioned by the previous speakers this boils down to a very large extent to the human capital issue already mentioned second one considering easing legal entry to work life this is actually something that's also there's been a little bit of debate about that but personally I see this as a rather crucial element that it's generally not on good for most people who don't have some income at least it's good for yourself worth especially in a society like Finland where people's social position is often defined through their work life position and then to some extent accept and support cultural and so on traditions that are sued around here now the big thing is and this is what we're policy makers sometimes maybe a little bit too hasty that a lot of this takes a lot of time okay so you simply have to trust that the choices you make lead to the desired outcome sooner but generally later and what we have to remember here is that the more we focus on the so-called first generation be the refugees or whoever the better their children will do it's about social inheritance of your position in society okay regarding inequality not to forget the great musculos hierarchy of needs where you know when you have shelter and food and so on you still have to keep yourself worth you know to be to be proud of yourself and I think this is a key point in discrimination especially in social movements that aim to in the extreme cases dehumanize others but in the less extreme cases great place great suspicion on on certain groups be they cultural or religious or whatever familial traditions so that is something we always have to remember people will need to have well I could say almost a right to feel good about themselves and about their vision of a good life various measures to combat both direct and indirect discrimination which are not always that easy to identify and then understand that discrimination processes of inequality change also over time how it was a decade or two ago might be different today and taking a pragmatist view that inequalities will always persist in one form or another but the key thing what we can do and where we can be effective is to minimize that okay thank you