Is the sauna a good integrator?

If a person asked me what is one of the most important cultural institutions enjoyed by a great number of Finns, I’d respond: the sauna.

The sauna is more than a room where people bathe and sweat naked in 80-100 Celsius (176-212 Fahrenheit) temperatures. It’s a way of life for some Finns – so much so, that when we die some hope there will be a sauna nearby in their next life.

It’s interesting to note that the sauna is the only Finnish word that has spread and been adopted by so many languages. Well… in almost all languages except for Swedish, where it is called bastu.

Writer Maila Talvio (1871-1951) once said that Finns have been unanimous for centuries about one matter – the sauna. For as long as children are born in this far-flung land, she said such unanimity will characterize the Finns.

The sauna is a good yardstick – like the automobile in the United States – to measure how living standards have risen. Compared to about 2 million today, there were some 1.5 million saunas in 1990 versus half a million in the 1930s.

That’s a lot of saunas, considering that we’re a nation of only 5.2 million people. If a typical Finnish family has 3-4 members, it means that everyone in this country has access to a sauna.

If the sauna is a sacred place for Finns where they bathe and resolve problems and differences, could it be used to integrate foreigners? Could the future “integration association of Finland” have as its logo a sauna with people of different cultures bathing in the heat?

Finnish baseball was another uniter in the early decades of Finland’s independence. Could it serve to promote greater understanding between the Finns and different national groups?

What other elements of our culture could help foreigners understand the inhabitants of this land we call Finland and undermine suspicion?

The aim of the Migrant Tale blog

Owing to the traffic that this blog has generated, I have decided on the following code of conduct:

1) This is NOT a forum to further the mistaken causes of racism, xenophobia, cultural nationalism and stereotypes of ANY group irrespective of their background, nationality and/or creed.
2) The blog aims to become a forum that furthers an immigrant’s chances of living a successful life in Finland.
3) The blog wants to become a social network for people to get good advice.
4) It aims to expose problems without fear nor favor about the problems Finland’s new inhabitants are facing and answer questions that Finns may have of these cultures.

Placing Finnish immigration policy on an effective path

I never thought that a few posts trying to look at such an issue like discrimination in Finland could inflame debate. If anything, it shows that there is a problem in this area. I have lived long enough in Finland and studied its culture since a child to know the challenges facing this country.

If Finland is to overcome this challenge and wants to put into force a dynamic immigration/integration policy, I believe it will have to look elsewhere.

A good source are the Finns that have immigrated abroad. They can give insightful information to authorities on what matters need to work in a society for the country to reap the benefits from its new inhabitants.

Unfortunately, Finland’s immigration policy in the past has been guided essentially by one factor: how do we hinder people from coming to the country. This, of course, changed when Finland became a EU member in 1995. Things are changing but I am not holding my breath until I start to see changes.

Where should the changes come? Employment, employment and employment. It is disgraceful for a country like Finland to have on average 20% unemployment among foreigners and over 50% among some national groups. How are these people supposed to “integrate” if they cannot even get work? If the country cannot employ these people, why even bother bringing them here? Even unemployment figures for the whole country (about 7%) leave a lot to be desired and reveal a wider problem.

Certainly some may claim that high unemployment among foreigners may be these people’s fault. Yes, there may be some truth in that, but a 20% jobless figure reveals a big problem. It is easier to pay unemployment/social welfare than to confront the issue and grab it by the horns. One of the biggest challenges in this area is job discrimination.

There are some parties such as the Swedish Folk Party that want to change the situation. It is never too late to start.

I once asked a long time ago a former Social Democrat MP why that person was not more outspoken on racism. The person’s response was quite incredible: “I am afraid about a public backlash.” The fear of anti-foreign sentiment was so strong at the time that the politician thought it was better to leave the issue alone.

That kind of leadership reveals why change has been slow in Finland.

But we should ask ourselves a simple question: Why do we want change and why should public officials be more outspoken against discrimination?

The answer is simple: If we allow discrimination to get the upper hand of things, then the biggest loser will be Finland.

The Finnish integration model that is doomed to fail

Ever since I moved to Finland thirty years ago, I have watched how immigration officials and their planners have attempted to deal with foreigners. When I came to Finland in the late- 1970s, there were so few outsiders living in the country that some sociologists like Heikki Waris claimed that there was no racism as a result.

Looking at Finland’s history, ethnicity and/or nationalism have played powerful roles in shaping the country’s history last century, especially if we look at our relations with the former Soviet Union. Irrespective of the small number of outsiders, racism always existed in Finland. Waris only had to look at the treatment of the Roma or how some Finns perceived the “lazy” Orthodox Skolt Saami versus the more “efficient” Lutheran Saami. Any sociological study of how some blacks were treated in the 1960s in Finland would have proven Waris’ argument incorrect. Brand logos like Musta Pekka, the former black mascot on Fazer licorice, and very old ones no longer in existence such as “Kongo” shoe polish explain the obsolete view some Finns had of black people.

By keeping the number of foreigners small does not help purge a country of racism. The argument is as ridiculous like a white person from the South of the United States claiming at the height of the slave era that there was no racism until blacks started living in that part of the country.

Sometimes I think that Finland’s integration model before for foreigners was based on the idea that if you integrate and disappear, everything will be find. A good example was when the Vietnamese boat people came to Finland. Instead of concentrating them in one area, our “intelligent” social planners spread them throughout the country evidently as way to speed up their integration.

What should Finland’s effective integration model be? For one, it should be founded on human rights and should reflect the underlying spirit of the social welfare state — nobody is left behind because we are a community. You do not need a policy like multiculturalism in Canada to understand that everything works more effectively when there is respect and sensitivity for other cultures. Like religious and political freedom, people have a right to practice their culture.

Any other so-called “integration” model that tramples on the human rights of a person and offers simplistic answers to a complex matter, such as those former Finnish mascots depicting blacks, will not work and are doomed to fail.

Finland’s multicultural challenge in the 21st century

Just like when Finland won its independence from the former Soviet Union in the last century, the country will face new challenges to its cultural identity.

In the 20th century, after December 6, 1917, when Finland gained its cherished independence, there was a lot of work done to exert Finnish culture and wipe out the symbols of Russian culture.

Finland almost succeeded at becoming a near-homogeneous society in the last century. By the 1960s, the number of foreigners had dwindled to a mere 6,000. Presently, there are over 100,000 foreigners that live in Finland. Some Finns see “multiculturalism” as a threat to what was achieved culturally in the past century.

Multiculturalism is not a new concept. Since the dawn of time, when primates became bipedal, different tribes and groups have integrated with each other with varying results. The Canadian concept of multiculturalism aims to teach all nationalities and people with different cultural backgrounds to live side by side in harmony.

Finnish culture was never monocultural nor homogeneous. We were taught to think that way by keeping our definition very tight and inflexible on Finnish culture.

Some may ask about the outlandish things that the former Soviet Union did to Finland during the Second World War. Nobody cannot deny that the injustices that Finland endured at the hands of an autocratic communist regime were terrible.

I am in favor that the the Karelian Isthmus, Viena Karelia, Salla and Petsamo should be one day returned to Finland. I understand, however, that we can never aspire to rejoin these territories as purely Finnish regions but with other minorities such as Russian speakers. Taking into account our upbringing, history with Russia and cultural intransigence, it would be a too difficult pill for some Finns to swallow.

While multiculturalism is no magic cure for all, it offers us better chances to live side by side other cultures and possibly even find solutions to old territorial disputes such as Karelia.

Owing to the rapidly aging Finnish population, which is a real threat to our culture and economic livelihood, multiculturalism will help us resolve many difficult challenges in the future.

If Finland’s aim was to build a near-homogeneous culture in the last century, it’s greatest challenge will be to build a multicultural Finnish society in this century.

Some good advice about Finnish culture

Some people who move to Finland for the first time may suffer from a generous dose of culture shock like in any country.

In the thirty years that I have lived in Finland on and off, the best advice I can give you and the Finns is the following: What is normal in your culture may be abnormal in another — and viceversa.

One of the most common observations I hear from some foreigners that live in Finland is that Finns are “cold.” Even though some may greet you with a laconic “hei,” it does not mean that they are “cold.” It only shows that some Finns greet that way because it is normal in their culture.

The matter that surprised me the most about Finland when I moved here was the Finns’ view of the people who lived in different parts of the country. “The Hämäläinens are slow,” one would say as it it were a scientific fact, while another would affirm: The Savolainens are all crooked people. Never trust a Gypsy – they are all thieves!”

Certainly such simplistic definitions of a so-called regional character, which does not exist, also must have rubbed off on how some Finns see foreigners today.

But all those types of so-called fictional behavior “traits” are nothing more than stereotypes and not based on any empirical study. They are only cultural fairy tales.

Foreigners will help Finns see who they are

My father, who moved to Europe from Argentina at the age of 21in the early 1950s, told me that he never learned so much about himself except when he became a foreigner.

In the same manner, and as more foreigners move to Finland, can they help us see the positive and negative aspects of our society? Undoubtedly, one of the positive matters that they will reinforce is our high standard of living and our social welfare system, which is supposed to be based on social justice and equality for all. These values make a Nordic nation such as Finland a beacon of hope in a very troubled world.

Some of the negative matters that foreigners have exposed with their high 20% unemployment are the structural deficiencies of the economy, according to a report by the Financial Times:

The numbers tell a curious story. Finland has recovered from the recession of the early 1990s and its economy grew 6 per cent in 2006.

The country’s gross domestic product has grown by an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent between 1994 and 2005, well above the 1.8 per cent average for members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and easily outstripping 2.1 per cent growth in the US and 2.5 per cent in the UK.

But despite this performance, employment growth is weak, hovering at 0.4 per cent, just over the OECD average of 0.3 per cent. This is far lower than it should be given the strong economy and reflects deep underlying structural problems that have been masked by growth, according to private sector analysis.

When speaking to refugees in Finland from countries such as Sudan, who are probably suffering from over 90% unemployment, one sees how social assistance from KELA and other institutions, together with our strict labor laws, slow instead of facilitate their integration process into our society. In the same manner, it also permits society, policy makers and politicians to wash their hands from the challenging task of integrating them.

The presence of foreigners will reveal many good and bad things about ourselves. Some of these, like racism, been already come to light. Heikki Waris, one of the foremost Finnish sociologists, claimed in the 1960s that there was no racism in Finland because Finnish society was homogeneous.

How can a society be homogeneous?! It can be near-homogeneous but never homogeneous. What about the Roma of Finland? Certainly there was and still is a lot of racism towards that group. I could list other examples such as the Sami, Skolt Sami and others.

Some questions about immigration to Finland

Many thanks to all of you that have taken so actively part in the debate on immigration to Finland. There have been a wide spectrum of opinions over the issue. The most positive matter that these comments have shown is that we can debate them in a civil fashion. But there are some questions that I posed that never got answers:

1) Some argued that if foreigners come to Finland, they should be forced to learn about Finnish culture. How do you force people to learn Finnish culture?

2) I asked what is Finnish culture. What aspects of our culture should foreigners be forced to learn?

3) Others thought that the policy of multiculturalism, which has its roots in Canada, is a bad thing because it creates ghettos. While I disagree with the latter claim, I asked what other policies could be more effective to accommodate people from different cultures, creeds and backgrounds?

Could anyone shed light on the above-mentioned questions?

What have the arguments shown?

Some of the comments have revealed that there is still too much ignorance and preconceived ideas on immigration that are simply false. One of these is that immigrants are lazy and that they want to use Finland’s generous welfare system. There are all types of people — native and non-natives — but I tend to believe that it takes guts and ambition to leave a country for another one. The immigrant usually ends up working more than the native and for less money.

Another matter that surprises me is that some people, who claim to have an education and are privileged to live in a society like Finland, show little understanding for outsiders. Certainly part of one’s education should teach us how to think and to be outspoken for those that suffer from economic and political persecution.

Why do some want to impose one set of standards for Finns and another one for immigrants? Certainly these type of double standards already imply that we are favoring a segregated society.