Insiders or Outsiders Within? Immigrants in the Finnish Labor Market

Authors

• Annika Forsander

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23979/fypr.44984

Keywords:

immigration, labor migration, labor policies

Abstract

This article focuses on the position of immigrants on the Finnish labor marketin the
context of recent migration history and the disintegration of the traditional paid-work
society. Finland is a so-called late immigration country, where a positive trend in
migratory movements did not begin until the beginning of the l 990s and where the
labor migration phase after WWII was experienced not as an immigration country
but as ane of emigration. One outcome of this is that immigrants are treated in society
as a social burden rather than a labor resource. Results of an empirical study concerning
immigrants in the Finnish labor market indicate that more than a half of
immigrants who have been residing in Finland for several years have an unstable
labor market career, and almost one-third of them are in the margins of the Finnish
labor market. It seems that in Finland, as in the labor markets in many other postindustrial
societies, immigrants are acting as a buffer against upswings and downswings
in the economy.