(18.09.2002) The number of immigrants in Finland started to rise fast at the turn of the 1990´s. Most immigrants come to Finland because of reasons that are not related to the need for their labour: they have moved because of the family reasons, as refugees, as ethnic remigrants from the former Soviet union or as students. The number of immigrants who come to work has begun to rise only in recent years. Because most of the immigrants do not have a job waiting for them when they arrive, the employment of immigrants has become an important social challenge.

This study set out to explain how those immigrants who had already resided in Finland for a few years had found their way into the Finnish labour market, and which factors affected their labour market position. This research occurs in the labour market context because the labour market brings not only a living standard, but also social status and the possibility of full citizenship.

This study explores immigrants’ labour market status in the context of the restructuring of the labour market, and also in the context of Finnish migration history. The position of immigrants in society is determined by the structures of the receiving society. The Nordic welfare state is based on the ideal of the national homogeneity, and social structures do not adapt easily to respond to the growing diversity of life-styles. In Nordic societies, the threshold of labour market inclusion is high, which keeps unemployment high among immigrants. In spite of this, the Nordic welfare state has been successful in rejecting poverty, though the danger of the ethnification of poverty does exist in Finland.

The empirical data used in this study is based on register material from the labour administration and Statistics Finland. The empirical material covers those who moved to Finland in 1989-93. Finnish and Swedish citizens were excluded. Statistical data is complemented by interview data that describe immigrants´ labour market career.

It is not possible to find a single reason that alone could explain immigrants´ labour market status. Instead, there are many factors, both qualitative and statistically operationable.

The place of origin of the immigrants, in other words, whether they come from countries that produce refugees, or from the former Soviet Union, or from Western countries, is the strongest explaining variable in statistical data. The labour market status of refugees and of those who immigrated from developing countries was shown to be the weakest, whereas it proved strongest among Asians and especially immigrants from Western countries. This can be interpreted to mean that immigrants are affected by the global economic order and by the unequal division of possibilities that shape the ethnic and social hierarchy in the receiving society.

Educational background explains labour market status only partially. More important than the amount of education is the labour market value of the education. It was shown that a degree attained in Finland offered a better starting point for employment than a degree attained elsewhere.

The industrial sector offers job possibilities especially to those immigrants migrating from the former Soviet Union. Asians, and immigrants who arrive from Mediterranean countries are over-represented in the food industry. The cleaning industry also employs many immigrants. It seems that the multiculturalisation of the Finnish labour market is lead by the service industry, unlike in countries where the internalisation of the labour market was fueled by reconstruction and industrialisation following the Second World War.

Those immigrants who have been employed almost since the beginning of their time of residence in Finland made up only 5 per cent of those studied in 1997. Members of this group are considered to have a stable labour market status. The majority of the immigrants studied were in an unstable (60 %) or marginal (28 %) labour market position in the Finnish labour market, and 7 per cent were outside of the labour force.

A weak attachment to the labour market causes dependency on social income transfers. In 1997, 61 per cent of the immigrants studied received taxable social income transfers, and the most typical form of the income transfers was the unemployment benefit. The differences in the division of social income transfers between and within different citizenship groups were significant, however. Most of the social income transfers went to those citizenship groups that had the higest number of children and the lowest employment rate. These groups were mainly refugees.

The restructuring of the labour market during the last decades has witnessed a growing emphasis on cultural and social knowledge, alongside traditional human capital, such as education, work experience and language skills. Employees have to know the right things, the right people and speak in the right way in order to attain the trust of the labour market gatekeepers, to become accepted as an employee, and to reach the next step in their careers. Even though the labour market will be increasingly international in the future, the significance of locally defined skills does not diminish. On the contrary: the expansion of the service industry, re-organisation of industrial production and team work all emphasise the significance of locally defined cultural and social skills in working life.

For immigrants, this tendency towards an emphasis on cultural and social skills is problematic. It is possible to place the blame on a lack of cultural and social skills when there is a desire to close the labour market to a group of a people that in one way or another deviates from the norms of the majority. For immigrants, the risk of being marginalised in the labour market is, therefore, even greater in the second generation.