foreign investment Archives

Strict banking laws in Finland leave refugees without bank accounts and discourage foreign investment

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Stateless refugees cannot still open bank accounts in regions like Etelä-Savo in Eastern Finland, according to Länsi-Savo, a Mikkeli-based daily. Not only are stateless persons affected but different municipalities that want to attract foreign investment. Some small- and medium-sized companies that want to relocate in Finland from Russia have a difficult time opening bank account as well.

Migrant Tales understands that there is no standard procedure for opening a bank account in Finland for stateless persons, who cannot confirm their original identity. Some branch offices not only permit stateless persons to open bank accounts but have access to online banking.

According to Länsi-Savo, opening a bank account in Mikkeli has become more difficult, if not impossible.

If a stateless person cannot open a bank account, it effectively means that he or she cannot be paid assistance by the state. In order to avoid such a problem, municipalities like Mikkeli cannot accept refugees from Syria, according to a municipal employee who works with refugees.

The most outrageous aspect of this policy is that there aren’t any standard rule but instead allows bank to treat people on a one-to-one basis. Some stateless refugees in cities like Kouvola and Tampere haven’t had problems in opening bank accounts and even getting online banking services.

Last year I encountered this problem head on when I went to Nordea bank in Mikkeli with a stateless person. After a few questions, the bank employee said that the person needs a valid passport to open an account at that bank. But if on that passport it reads ”his/her identity cannot be confirmed,” the person can never open an account at Nordea.

I asked the Nordea employee what could be done.

“Why don’t you go to OP bank,” she said. “I’ve read in Länsi-Savo [the local paper] that such persons can open accounts at that bank.”

Surprised by what I was hearing, I asked the bank employee if she was serious.

“Why do they [OP bank] have one set of rules and you have another?” I asked. “Don’t you think it is pretty incredible that you are sending a potential client to the competition?”

The bank employee didn’t answer my question.

Let’s say that the person is lucky and is able to open a bank account but cannot get online banking services. That’s how Finns did their banking over two decades ago. They stood in lines and asked the bank teller to pay their bills.

Even in getting banking services, some immigrants are second-class members of this society.

YLE in English: Lifting visa requirements from Russians would create thousands of jobs

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Migrant Tales

This has got to be one of the strangest stories I’ve read on YLE in English. It claims that lifting visa requirements for Russians would create thousands of job in Finland. Is xenophobia so ingrained in some Finns that they still think that foreigners and Russians are such a threat that they don’t grasp that tourism, never mind immigration, spur economic growth and create jobs?

Writes YLE in English: “Visa freedom would boost the Finnish economy and increase employment, according to researchers at the University of Eastern Finland. Last year Russians made four million journeys to Finland, with a visa-free regime expected to double the volume of traffic.”

The negative attitudes that some house of immigrants, which is maintained by myths and prejudice passed from generation to generation and learned at home and at school, is the real culprit that is feeding our ignorance.

It not only feeds our ignorance and fear but is impoverishing us as a nation. It is our prejudice that is robing us of new blood, innovation and hard work.

Ever thought why we are required in this country to raise the retirement age? Because our population is graying and because there are too few young people replacing those jobs left by our ever-growing army of pensioners.

Read story here.

Some Finns are still suspicious of immigrants and outsiders no matter how many positive examples you show them.

Even if an OECD study published in June that immigration boosted economic growth in Finland in 2011 by 0.16%, there are too many in Finland who believe that immigration is a burden and threat on our society.

As long as we continue to see immigrants and Otherness with suspicion, the more harm we will inflict on our nation.

Therefore, those who spread urban myths of immigrants and racism are the real enemies of our society who will leave you without a job and a future.

Max Jakobson dies but his legacy and the cold war linger on

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Migrant Tales

This blog entry is dedicated to the late Donald Fields, Helsinki correspondent of the BBC, The Guardian and Politiken to 1988.

I read with mixed thoughts about the death of Max Jakobson (1923-2013), a diplomat who shaped Finland’s policy of neutrality during the cold war. While I am certain that he was an able diplomat, he was no friend of dissension or anyone who dared to question Helsinki’s sacrosanct foreign policy with Moscow.

He didn’t hide his disdain for foreign correspondents as can be seen in the summer 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs: “…Finland is forever at the mercy of the itinerant columnist who after lunch and cocktails in Helsinki is ready to pronounce himself upon the fate of the Finnish people. A person visiting, say, London for the first time, who does not know English and has only a vague notion of the significance of Dunkirk or the role of Winston Churchill, would hardly be regarded as qualified to comment on the British scene today.”

Did cold war Finland have to treat the media with such contempt and overbearing censorship?

Future historians will shed light on that question.

Helsingin Sanomat writes about the death of Max Jakobson on Monday’s edition.

In the 1980s, people like Pekka Karhuvaara, Lasse Lehtinen, Matti Kohva, Ralf Friberg and others made sure that what you wrote about Helsinki-Moscow relations was to their liking and toed the official foreign policy line.

If you didn’t you were black listed, period.

The foreign ministry together with Finnfacts did everything possible to brighten Finland’s name by inviting foreign journalists to the country. They would pay their trips, stay, wine and dine them to win them over. Many, I’m certain, became good friends of this country after such freebies.

My first attempt to interview Jakobson was in 1989 shortly after I started to work for the Financial Times in Helsinki. First he accepted the interview but later canceled it.

I suspect the reason why Jakobson canceled the interview was because he had learned about my stand against the Soviet Union, Finnish foreign policy and especially those Soviet asylum seekers who were deported back to the former U.S.S.R.

I got my second chance when Christian Tyler of the Financial Times came to Finland to do a special report on the eventual demise of the Soviet Union and its impact on Finland. Tyler had an appointment with Jakobson and I tagged along.

This is what we wrote in The last wall in Europe, published in January 1991:

“Even Max Jakobson, the distinguished former diplomat and most eloquent apologist for Finland’s extreme post-war neutrality, agrees that the government has been traditionally inhospitable to immigrants and slow to respond to the turmoil around its borders. “The period of stagnation was not bad for Finland,” he said but he added: “There is nothing wrong with stagnation if you can do it on a high income level as we did.” Finland had no obligation to Soviet citizens, but rather an opportunity. “Our obligation is to look after our own interests.”

The foreign ministry wasn’t naturally happy with what we wrote. Tyler told me that he published in a separate story an interview with Jakobson, which was more favarable.

While the cold war is still too close to us to study objectively, I suspect that future researchers and historians will look at this period with mixed feelings. Even if we were able to build a successful Nordic welfare state after the armistice with Moscow in 1944, we were near-isolated form the world. Even if we lost hundreds of thousands of able workers who migrated to Sweden after World War 2, we kept our borders effectively closed to immigrants and the outside world.

No matter how much you tried to accept the foreign ministry’s and Jakobson’s view of Finland’s neutrality, it always boiled down to censorship and even greater doses of self-censorship. Thanks to Finland’s near-isolation, foreign investment was almost negligible thanks to the Restricting Act of 1939 (law 219/1939) and it was not until 1983, 65 years after independence, that Finland got its first Aliens Act.

What is the legacy that Jakobson and Finland’s cold war foreign policy left on Finland?

While both kept Finland from becoming a Warsaw Pact member, it came with a high price. The cost can be seen today in our attitudes and suspicion of foreigners, especially of Russians.

If we still believe that we are at war with Russia, how can we be an open society that aims to integrate newcomers?

If there is anything holding us back, it is the cold war legacy.

Kouvolan Sanomat of Finland asks four people if they’d work for a foreign company

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Migrant Tales

You’d think that most Finns know that their country is part of the globalized world…Well, almost everyone knows but there are just a few who haven’t figured it out.

Kouvola Sanomat: Do you have anything against being hired by a foreign-owned company?

Ville-Matti Ahola: “At the moment I am employed, but if I needed a job I’d be happy to accept [working for a foreign company]. Jobs are so hard to find these days.”
Timo Pöljö: “Of course I’d accept. Now I have to drive long distances to work. If the workplace were in this town I could bike to work”.
Jenni Ylätalo: “Absolutely not. I moved to Kaipiainen because this is a small village and one does not see foreigners here. I’m patriotic and think Finland belongs to the Finns”.
Outi Vainonen: “Hard to say. I do not have a job at the moment and one needs a job. But it’s a difficult topic since one can’t tell what kind of people foreigners are”.

Thank you Ossi Mäntylahti for the heads-up.