The long road to becoming a Finn Длинная дорога к финскому гражданству.
THE OFFICE of the Immigration Police in Malmi is a fairly depressing place. It’s an office where you walk in, take a number, and sit down to spend the rest of your day. Whereas the British Embassy will only process passport applications by appointment, the Immigration Police will not make appointments at all, meaning that applicants have little choice but to take a day off work to holiday in sunny Malmi.
IT’S expensive. Filing an application costs €400, regardless of whether or not the application is successful. Assuming the applicant then wants a passport, they can look forward to shelling out another €200 more for the passport itself.
AND it is slow. An application takes anywhere between 12 and 30 months to process, with suggestions that these times will lengthen as the numbers applying increase.
ALL of which may seem harmless enough, were the government not also trying to encourage new immigrants to move here. It does seem that Finland both needs and wants more tax paying citizens, and the growing lines at the Immigration Police station also suggests that there are people who wish to settle here permanently. But what message does it send to potential new citizens that they may have to pay €600 and wait more than two years before they can get a Finnish passport?
FOR many migrants, citizenship is as much an emotional thing as a practical one. For people to call Finland home, they want to carry the passport. In much the same way as they may well feel that they want to, and should, cheer on Teemu and the boys at the ice hockey championships, or choose Finnish-made produce over imported.
ADMITTEDLY, the numbers are growing. There are now 132,000 foreign citizens in Finland, up from the 80,000 ten years ago. Of these, some 85,000 come from outside the EU. This means a huge amount of work for the people who check out the background and documents of those applying for Finnish citizenship. But it could be argued that the authorities do themselves few favours in not streamlining the process.
THE forms, available only in Finnish and Swedish, are a weighty eight pages long, and include questions as pressing as a list of countries visited on holiday during the past six years.
And although I think it is fair to require applicants for Finnish citizenship to actually speak Finnish, the five hour exam is both laborious and poorly organised and desperately in need of an overhaul. Not surprisingly, it turns out the exam was not designed as a citizenship exam at all, but as a Finnish version of an English language model originally used with Finnish students.
AS IT stands, it is much easier for EU citizens to simply live here as a resident and not bother with the red tape that the application necessarily involves. Which is fine, but it neither encourages those people to stay, nor strengthens their bond with their adopted home. Surely if the government is serious about attracting new taxpayers it would be worth creating a system which encourages people to make a commitment, both economic and emotional, to the country?
MEANWHILE, back in Malmi, the queues are only growing longer. It’s a process that seems as inefficient as to be almost deliberately tiresome, but then possibly this can also be explained. Perhaps the rationale is that foreigners lacking the sisu to slog their way through the paperwork wouldn’t have made good Finns anyway.
David Brown David Brown runs Word Of Mouth Ltd, a language consultancy working with politicians and journalists. He also works as a travel writer, and has recently returned from Argentina and Chile. He has lived in Finland for six years.
Before being able to pay €600 and wait more than two years for citizenship, one must get a permanent resident status (P permit), which in turn requires at least 4 years of living on a continuous permit (A permit). And before obtaining a continuous permit you may have to live several years on a temporary permit (B permit)...
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