Browsing by Subject "Immigration"
Now showing items 1-10 of 10
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(2019)The obligation to consider the best interests of the child in all cases concerning children has a central status in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989. This article provides a systematic comparison of how the best interests concept is understood and used in child protection and immigration jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. The article compares all child protection and immigration judgments where the court has referred to the best interests of the child until the end of 2017. It shows that the court assesses the best interests of the child differently in the two case groups. First, in child protection cases, the court assumes that it is in the child’s best interests to live with her parents, whereas in immigration cases, family unity is not the starting point of the court. Secondly, in immigration cases, the child’s young age is understood as adaptability, whereas in child protection cases, young age is associated with care needs. Thirdly, the court has considered children’s views in several child protection cases but rarely in immigration cases. This article argues that, from the perspective of children’s rights, the court’s approach in immigration cases is problematic.
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(Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2017)23Citizenship ceremonies have been practiced for at least a century in the United States. This article explores what citizenship ceremonies – the rituals created to ‘make’ new citizens – can tell us about understandings of citizenship and the nation. Focusing on the case of the US, the paper asks who is being held up as the welcomed citizen and who is excluded in these public events. What does it mean to ‘welcome’ a new citizen and how are migration and national history imagined in these events? These questions become increasingly urgent in the context of securitization and given current debates about the withdrawal of citizenship from suspected ‘extremists’.
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(2021)In this article, I explore the memory and great transformation of Ingrian Finnish families originally from Ingria (a historical area around Saint Petersburg) in the Soviet Union during deportations, Stalinist terror, and clashes of ideologies and practice. In an Ingrian Finnish memory culture, families were an important source and carrier of memories of exile and repression from one generation to another. I used the family archival material of letters, life histories and family narratives, poetry, family trees, and photographs as research material and analyzed the social genealogy of repressed Ingrian Finnish families. The case study of an extended family included several nuclear families, and 33 members and three generations in the 1930s. The family histories demonstrated the great transformation and social collapse of the Ingrian Finnish family members in the 1930s and early 1940s from independent peasants to poor deportees, forced labourers, refugees and prisoners in the Gulag. Members of the extended family were repressed during Stalin’s time, with some managing to take refuge in Finland and Sweden. Two out of three family members were deported in the 1930s and one in three during the Second World War. Half of those deported in the 1930s escaped. Several family members experienced many repressions during their life span; some women were deported several times and most men were deported, arrested, and died at an early age. At least five men were killed in the political violence, four of them were executed in the Stalinist terror in 1938. The nuclear families studied were violently broken up, leaving them without a father. I found a range of family mobilities from escape to education. Based on my analyses, I argue that family histories of repressions were a meeting point with life histories and the minority/national history of Ingrian Finns. Family histories of repressed families build a bridge over the personal and collective memories in the context of Ingrian Finnish memory culture.
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(Helsingin yliopisto, 2019)The topic of this thesis is to explore the impact of immigration on the task specialization of natives. According to the literature, immigration does not have a significant negative impact on the employment nor the wages of natives. A one possible reason for this can be imperfect substitutability which means that natives and immigrants with similar education are not perfect substitutes and thus, they do not compete for the same jobs. Natives may have a comparative advantage in interactive tasks and immigrants in manual tasks. An exact research question is to investigate if less educated natives locate to less manual and more interactive jobs as the shares of similarly educated foreign-born people rise. This is implemented by constructing variables which describe the manual and interactive task intensities of different occupation classes. Peri and Sparber (2009) and Amuedo-Dorantes and de la Rica (2011) have investigated similar questions and therefore, their studies are the main references of this thesis. The data of this study is provided by Ipums International and O*Net data from the US Department of Labor. The first of these two is census microdata from France and it includes eight samples between the years 1962 and 2011. The second dataset contains numerical values which describe the importance of different abilities of different occupations. The analysis is made by applying the method of ordinary least squares and the method of instrumental variables. The instrumental variable for the shares of foreign-born workers is formed by imputing the shares of immigrants from several source countries, based on the distribution of immigrant groups across regions in the year 1962. The results support the hypothesis rather well. A one percentage point increase in the foreign-born share of less educated labour force lowers the manual-to-interactive task ratio of natives by approximately two percentages on average. However, the results regarding to different demographic groups are varied. The most unexpected observation is that the share of female immigrants affects the task specialization of both male and female natives much more than share of male immigrants does. In addition, education, age, the industry of occupation, and the business cycle of an economy seem to have impact on the possibilities of natives to shift to less manual and more interactive tasks. The results suggest that inflows of less educated immigrants indeed push less educated natives towards less manual and more interactive jobs. Nonetheless, because the estimates of previous studies have been smaller, it is likely that the estimates of this thesis are biased upward and the real impact of immigration on the task specialization of natives is more moderate.
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(Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2017)23
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(Forskningsinstitutet, Svenska social- och kommunalhögskolan vid Helsingfors universitet, 2011)Meddelanden
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(2013)Immigration in Finland has increased significantly in the last decades. The integration of immigrants and autochthonous Finns poses new challenges to the society. Nevertheless, the resulting cultural diversity creates opportunities for intercultural social development. According to previous studies, urban nature can benefit human well-being and it can also play a role in integration processes. However, the role urban nature can potentially play in integration is largely overlooked, and immigrants are rarely involved in the planning of urban nature. This paper presents the main results of a qualitative study carried out in Helsinki metropolitan area, Finland. The aim was to understand the role of urban nature in integration, and to address how the planning of urban nature can support integration and interculturalism. We found that using urban nature helps immigrants feel comfortable and enjoy their living environment. The inter- viewed immigrants were interested in getting information on urban planning, especially in their own neighbourhood, and many of them wanted to participate in planning, although they were unsure of their right to do so, and access to planning processes appeared problematic in many ways. To support integration and interculturalism, urban planning should take the opportunity to enhance intercultural understanding. Adhering to culturally sensitive processes, and developing trust with local residents by taking their views seriously, can do this. Nature has the potential to inspire people to connect with one another.
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(Helsingin yliopisto, 2015)This paper examines the effect of immigration on the native unemployment rate in Finland. A number of different estimations strategies are applied to discover the impact using the data from the 19 regions of Finland over a period of 16 years, from 2000 to 2015. The study also takes advantage of employing the share of foreigners in the population as the instrument in the estimation process. Other variables in the model include GDP per capita, net inter-municipal migration and educational attainment share of the labor force. The results indicate that changes in the share of inflow of immigrants in the labor force has a significant negative effect on the unemployment rates of natives. However, possible limitations, like failure to apply a skill-based approach of analysis, may have produced such results and they are also discussed in the paper.
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(Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2017)23The article discusses Hassan Blasim’s precarious position in the Finnish literary field. Blasim is an Iraqi-born author who came as a refugee to Finland in 2004. Since then, he has become an internationally acclaimed author whose short stories, written in Arabic, have been translated into more than 20 languages, including Finnish. However, his inclusion in the Finnish literary field is questionable: while he has gained increasing recognition in the form of awards and grants, he cannot join, due to the original language of his work, either the national writers’ union for Finnish speakers or its Swedish-language counterpart. Blasim’s status as an immigrant makes him a stranger in Finland, part insider and part outsider. The article elaborates on the sociological concept of “stranger”, as explicated by Georg Simmel, in reference to writers like Blasim. It also examines the media reception of Blasim and his books in Finland. The analysed material consists of journalistic texts on Blasim as well as his books published in Finnish newspapers and magazines from 2009 to 2014, from the first articles about him in the Finnish media to the news of him receiving the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
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(2015)In this article, we take a discursive psychological approach to study how ethnic return migrants discuss and account for episodes of discrimination, with a special focus on discursive strategies employed to deal with discrimination. The data come from nine focus group discussions held with ethnic Finnish migrants who have moved to Finland in adulthood from Russia, Canada, or the United States. Results of the analysis show two distinct ways of dealing with discrimination: problematising discrimination and downplaying discrimination. Problematising was accomplished by showing the critical difference between being categorised as Finnish or non-Finnish and challenging the criteria of Finnishness. Strategies of downplaying included normalising discrimination and emphasising positive experiences. The findings are discussed in relation to ethnic return migrants’ identity work and belonging to broader society.
