Remember back in the 1990s when Finland brought Vietnamese refugees and dispersed them like pepper throughout Finland? It appeared back then that the main goal of the migration authorities was to disseminate newcomers and make them vanish.
One matter that this type of coercive assimilation aimed at doing was to ensure that these Vietnamese boat people would not form communities. By not enabling them to form strong communities, white Finland was ensured.
Even today, you will hear, as I did this week, complaints by some municipal politicians that “too many migrants live in one area of the city.”
“Why don’t they disperse them and force them to live elsewhere?” one of the persons in the room asked. “They try to but then they always want to return [to where they lived].”
I wonder what such Finns I heard this week believe is an effective path towards inclusion. Apart from being too simplistic and revealing racist attitudes, such policies would never work.
And what about the hundreds of thousands off Finns that emigrated to other lands? Many stuck together, formed associations and groups, newspapers to defend their culture and lives in their new homeland.
The same thing that migrant and minority communities are doing today.
- Kotoutuminen #1: A good synonym for kotoutuminen is too many times the reinforcement of structural racism
- Kotoutuminen #2: A tool of white fragility to rule you
- Kotoutuminen #3: To touch or not to touch
- Kotoutuminen #4: Amalgamate, assimilate is the rule, two-way adaption is a pipedream
- Kotoutuminen #5: Perpetuating the Ulysses syndrome, a chronic stress disorder of refugees
- Kotoutuminen #6: The white Finnish teacher and the migrant adult child. Stop infantilizing!
- Kotoutuminen #7: How do we deal with our prejudices and exceptionalism?
- Kotoutuminen #8: Let’s do away with “us” and “them”
- Kotoutuminen #9: Spreading half-truths about integration
- Kotoutuminen #10: Misleading expectations that will keep you (dis)integrated
- Kotoutuminen #11: The teacher asks the student why Muslims kill people
- Kotoutuminen #12: Integration is as easy as 1+ 1 = 2. NOT!
- Kotoutuminen #13: There is no good Finnish word for inclusion just like with integration before
*Kotoutiminen is the Finnish term for integration. It came about in the late-1990s because there was no such term in the Finnish language.