Working Together: Skills and Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children
in Finland
While Finland’s foreign-born population remains small by international standards,
growth has been amongst the fastest in the OECD. Finland’s foreign-born population
have lower employment rates than native-born Finns, and women, in particular, are
struggling to integrate and face incentives to stay in the home. Indeed, the employment
gap among those arriving from outside the European Union is among the largest in the
OECD. This risks long-term implications for the integration of their children, many
of whom are struggling to thrive in the Finnish school system. Large inflows of asylum
seekers in 2015 put integration squarely on the agenda, and Finland developed a number
of innovative integration policies in response. Yet, numbers have since fallen dramatically,
raising questions of how to respond to the needs of a large cohort without scaling
up the integration system on a permanent basis. This review, the second in a series
on the skills and labour market integration of immigrants and their children, provides
an assessment of these and other challenges. It includes a holistic assessment of
Finland’s integration services – such as the new modular integration training, and
the Social Impact Bond – as well as challenges related to settlement, early labour
market contact and workplace segregation. An earlier review in the series looked at
integration policies in Sweden (2016).
Published on September 05, 2018