ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Narrating Migration in Nordic Countriesthere are considerable. Indeed, human rights watchdog organisationshave also drawn attention to these prejudices and to Russophobia ingeneral. A particular matter of concern has been the indifference ofsociety to such prejudices.Thus it is very difficult for Russian immigrants to progress onthe work market without supportive measures from the employmentauthorities. A report in 2006 noted that many measures concerningimmigrants aim directly at training and employment. In other words,these measures aim at making the immigrants “normal” clients ofthe work market in the same way as disabled, partially handicapped,or long-term unemployed persons. However, they do not take intoaccount the immigrants’ situation as a whole, nor do they questionthe effectiveness of the existing system. Moreover, ordinary Finns’preconceptions of immigrants can be stereotypical, which means thatthe culture of the work environment can at its worst become downrightracist. Authorities have paid too little attention to campaigns tochange attitudes or to provide work communities with multi-culturaleducation.SummaryImmigration to Finland has been strongly characterised by issuesrelating to the settlement of the Karelian evacuees and the integrationof re-immigrants of ethnic Finnish origin. The aims of immigrationpolicy were initially directed by the need to root the evacuees permanentlyin Finnish society. Particularly in the case of the Karelianevacuees, the authorities strove to guarantee a livelihood and placesin which to settle. The flood of Ingrian Finnish re-immigrants into thecountry in the 1990s, for its part, was launched by the idea of permittingimmigration as some kind of payment of a debt of honour. Theconcept of a debt of honour can be interpreted as arising from the factthat the Ingrians had suffered badly in Stalin’s purges on account oftheir being ethnically Finnish, and consequently the positive attitudeto them was an expression of sympathy for their sufferings. However,the re-immigration of the Ingrian Finns has been handled by the207