Finland wants 45,000 immigrants a year without fixing what happens after they arrive
EK published their immigration policy platform for 2027-2031. The economic case is strong, but nobody is talking about how to retain immigrants and actually get them employed.
EK published their immigration policy platform for 2027-2031 last week. The headline: Finland needs a net minimum of 45,000 immigrants per year to keep the economy running.
We agree. But the document reveals a familiar blind spot, one that keeps showing up in how Finland talks about immigration. Finland is asking for 45,000 people a year while running integration services that do not work, higher education career support that does not connect students to employers, and employment programmes that measure activity instead of outcomes. If the system that receives immigrants is this weak, the quality of who you select and how you prepare them matters far more than the volume.
Where EK gets it right#
Credit where it is due. EK makes the economic case without hedging. The dependency ratio projections are devastating. Without sustained immigration, Finland's demographic math does not work. They say this plainly, and that matters in a political climate where immigration is being debated as if it were optional.
Their proposal to abolish saatavuusharkinta (labour market testing) is the right call. They are honest that it currently applies to a fraction of foreign workers anyway, making the entire bureaucratic layer hard to justify. If full abolition does not fly politically, their fallback, exempting jobs above 2,400 euros per month, is pragmatic. Their alternative proposal also includes employer certification, where companies with a clean track record, no wage guarantee claims, and no tax debts could recruit without labour market testing entirely. That is a sensible fast track.
EK illustrates the absurdity of the current permit system with a line worth quoting directly: "Siivooja saisi koodata sivutyönä ja koodari käydä iltaisin siivoamassa ilman uutta lupaprosessia." A cleaner could code on the side and a coder could clean in the evenings without a new permit process. Right now, that requires a new residence permit application. The fact that EK has to propose this as a reform tells you how rigid the current system is.
The push for an eight-month unified job search period after losing employment is significant. Right now, a worker who loses their job gets three months. A specialist gets six. EK wants eight across the board. This matters more than it sounds.
Why? Because we have tracked what happens when immigrants lose jobs in Finland.
The revolving door is real, and EK's plan does not address it#
In 2025, Herizon tracked the employment journeys of 2,132 immigrants living in Finland. 203 people lost their jobs. 182 found a job and lost it again, and they are now unemployed.
That is nearly 400 people experiencing employment disruption in a single year, in a single community.
EK's document treats immigration as a pipeline problem. Get people in, speed up permits, reduce bureaucracy. These are valid priorities. But the pipeline does not end at the work permit. It does not even end at the job offer.
EK does not ask what happens after someone gets hired. Our data shows that structured onboarding during the first 90 days, workplace culture, communication norms, practical navigation of Finnish systems, dramatically improves retention. This is the core of our blueprint, and it needs to be standard in every employment programme.
The integration gap is an employer problem#
EK's platform has extensive proposals for what the government should do. Faster permits. Digital identity. One-stop settlement services. Tax deductions for relocation costs. Nordic marketing campaigns.
What is conspicuously absent is what employers themselves need to do.
The word "onboarding" does not appear in the document. Neither does "retention." The closest they get is a brief mention that employers should be able to make entries in government registers on behalf of their workers. That is administrative, not integration.
We see the consequences of this gap every day. The most common barrier to sustained employment is not skills. It is not language. It is understanding how Nordic workplaces actually operate. Flat hierarchies that expect self-direction from day one. Communication norms that differ fundamentally from most of the world. Unwritten rules that nobody writes down because nobody thinks they need to.
When we help people bridge these differences, over 40 people per month find jobs through our community. But getting hired is only half the story. Staying hired requires workplace integration. Structured onboarding for international hires, manager training for multicultural teams, and retention tracking by background so they can see where people drop off and why.
EK is right about the 1,600 euro threshold#
EK explicitly states that the current 1,600 euro per month income threshold for work permits should not be raised. We agree, and not as a theoretical position. It is worth noting that this section of EK's report is not only about low-income workers. The 45,000 figure covers all skill levels, from care workers to software engineers. But the 1,600 euro threshold shows who Finland actually wants.
When we were building Freska's home cleaning operations and recruiting from the Philippines in 2018, these were real jobs, with real career pathways, filled by people who went on to build lives in Finland. Raising the threshold would have locked out every single one of them. It would lock out the cleaners, the kitchen workers, the warehouse staff, the care assistants, the people Finland's service economy literally cannot function without.
There is a tendency in immigration debates to treat "skilled worker" as a synonym for high salary. It is not. A cleaner who shows up reliably, learns Finnish workplace norms, and builds a client base is skilled. A care worker managing the daily needs of elderly Finns is skilled. The 1,600 euro threshold recognises this, and raising it would be a policy choice to exclude the workers Finland needs most.
The common counterargument is that Finland already has enough unemployed people. It does. But those people are not moving to where the jobs are and they are not taking the jobs that need filling. This is not unique to Finland. Sweden and Norway have the same pattern. Domestic unemployment and labour shortages coexist because they are not the same problem. The people who are unemployed and the jobs that are open do not overlap nearly as much as the anti-immigration crowd pretends.
EK also notes that regional differences in living costs need to factor into how income thresholds are applied. A 1,600 euro salary in Helsinki and 1,600 euros in Joensuu are not the same thing. A regional adjustment tied to municipal cost-of-living indices would make the threshold meaningful everywhere, not just in cities where rents are lower.
Family reunification pulls in two directions#
EK wants to tighten family reunification for students with higher income thresholds and a mandatory one-year residence before family can join, while simultaneously arguing that Finland needs to retain international graduates.
Before debating whether these two positions contradict each other, there is a more fundamental problem to address. A significant share of family reunification cases among international students involves families that are not financially self-sufficient in Finland. The pattern is well known in immigration services: a student on a limited budget brings over a spouse who does not enter the labour market, the household cannot cover living costs, and the financial pressure cascades into housing problems, benefit dependency, and stalled integration for the entire family.
This is not a family reunification problem. It is a student selection and financial preparedness problem. If Finland is going to allow family reunification for students, the income threshold needs to reflect what it actually costs to support a family in Finland, not a theoretical minimum. And upstream, higher education institutions need to be honest with prospective students about whether studying in Finland is financially viable for someone planning to bring a family. Recruiting students who cannot realistically afford to live here, and then acting surprised when family reunification creates financial distress, is a failure at the admissions stage.
EK's proposal for higher income thresholds and a one-year residence requirement before family can join is a reasonable starting point. But it also creates a genuine tension. If you tell someone "we want you to build your career here" while making it harder to bring their family, you are creating an exit incentive. For many people, career opportunities do not outweigh being separated from your spouse and children. The solution is not to lower the bar. It is to ensure that the students Finland admits are in a position to meet it.
This connects directly to EK's other proposal in this section: abolishing kotihoidontuki (home care allowance). EK frames it as necessary for immigrant women's labour market participation and for getting immigrant children into early childhood education. The data supports this. The allowance creates a financial incentive to stay home, and for immigrant families where one spouse is already outside the labour market, it reinforces the pattern rather than breaking it. Integration stalls for the spouse, and often for the children too.
But abolishing it is politically explosive, and EK knows it. They have framed it as a gender equality measure, which gives them allies across the political spectrum. Whether that framing survives contact with the electorate depends on whether it comes with a clear transition plan, including expanded municipal early childhood education capacity and a phase-in period that does not punish families who are already relying on the allowance.
Students are the group Finland invests in, then loses#
Nearly half of international graduates leave Finland. EK acknowledges this. Their proposals, automatic post-graduation residence permits, AMK and university parity for permanent residency, directing internship subsidies toward international students, are all correct and overdue. But none of these fix who is being recruited in the first place, or whether they have a realistic chance of building a career here.
EK's student section misses the core problem. Nothing in Finland's system connects international students to employers while they are still studying. The students who stay are the ones who did internships, worked part-time in their field, or built a professional network before graduation. The ones who leave are the ones who graduated into a vacuum, degree in hand, no network, no idea how to navigate Finnish hiring.
We know this because we see both groups. Herizon's community includes 285 current higher education interns. We run networking events at company offices, Solita, KONE, Nordea, and others. We teach growth hacking and practical career skills. The students who come through our community and connect with employers early are the ones who stay. The ones who rely solely on higher education career services and EURES listings are the ones booking flights home.
EK proposes that higher education internship subsidies should be targeted at international students. Good. But internship subsidies alone do not solve the problem if students do not know how Finnish hiring works. International students do not fail because they lack qualifications. They fail because they do not understand that in Finland, jobs come through networks, not applications. Nobody teaches them this. Higher education institutions do not. TE services do not. Career fairs with 200 people and 15-minute booth conversations do not.
What actually works is structured exposure to employers, combined with explicit coaching on how Finnish workplaces operate. Not a pamphlet about "Finnish work culture." Actual practice. Networking in a Finnish context, understanding what flat hierarchy means in your daily work, learning to self-direct in an environment that will not hand you instructions.
EK also proposes that students should be required to participate in Finnish language training. We agree, with a caveat. The training has to exist at sufficient scale and flexibility first. Right now, language course availability varies wildly. In some cities, students can access courses easily. In others, they are waitlisted for months. Making language training mandatory without solving the supply side is a policy that punishes the student for the system's failure.
The proposal to share "correct and sufficient information" about Finland in students' countries of origin is important but undersold in EK's document. Too many international students arrive in Finland with wildly unrealistic expectations about the job market, about living costs, about how easy it will be to stay. Some of this is on the students themselves, but a lot of it is on the marketing materials higher education institutions use to recruit them. If Finland is going to charge international students tuition fees and then tell them they need to figure out employment on their own, the information gap at the recruitment stage is an ethical problem, not just a policy one.
Higher education institutions need to be measured on international graduate employment and retention rates. If an institution recruits 500 international students and 400 leave Finland within two years of graduating, that is not a successful internationalisation strategy. It is a revenue strategy. EK's document hints at accountability but does not name it this directly. A concrete step: publish international graduate employment and retention rates by institution annually, and tie a portion of internationalisation funding to those outcomes. If an institution cannot place its international graduates, it has no business recruiting them at this scale.
Credential recognition is a bottleneck nobody wants to own#
EK calls for faster recognition of foreign qualifications, particularly in healthcare and education. They highlight that EU/EEA nursing degrees are recognised but the process for non-EU qualifications is painfully slow.
The demographic urgency is hard to overstate. The healthcare sector needs close to 200,000 new workers by 2035 as the current workforce retires. The population aged 85 and over will nearly double. Finland is projected to have a quarter of a million people with dementia by 2040. These are not distant problems. They are already happening, and the workforce to handle them does not exist domestically.
It is not just slow. It is opaque, inconsistent, and demoralising. We have community members with years of professional experience and relevant degrees who spend 12 to 18 months navigating a recognition process that nobody can clearly explain to them. Some give up and take unrelated jobs. Some leave Finland.
The proposal for permanent supplementary training models, practical nurse by competency exam, pathway from practical nurse to registered nurse, is sound. But the language training component is where most people actually get stuck. EK calls for a "nationally funded unified language training and testing model." This exists in theory. In practice, the availability of Finnish language courses varies wildly by municipality, waitlists can stretch for months, and the courses rarely accommodate people who are working at the same time.
EK's own proposal elsewhere in the document, that language training combined with work should be available nationwide, directly contradicts the reality on the ground. If they are serious about credential recognition for healthcare workers, the language pathway has to be built into the recognition process, not treated as a separate problem the individual has to solve on their own time.
EK talks about integration. We do it.#
EK's integration section reads like a wishlist of things that need to already exist. Language training that accommodates working people, kotoutumispalvelut extended to work-based immigrants and their spouses, multilingual societal orientation, school places for foreign-language children available mid-year, youth sports and activity programmes.
We agree with all of it. Herizon has been delivering most of this through community infrastructure for years, without municipal budgets and without government contracts.
The most important point in EK's integration section is about the invisible group. People outside the workforce, especially those caring for children at home, must remain within integration services. This is about immigrant spouses, overwhelmingly women, who fall into an integration black hole. They are not in the employment system so TE services do not see them. They are not in education so higher education institutions do not see them. They are at home, isolated, and their integration clock is ticking backwards.
We see this in our community constantly. The employed partner integrates through work. The spouse at home does not. Years pass. The family's overall integration stalls because one half is invisible to the system.
EK's proposal to abolish kotihoidontuki is partly aimed at this group. But removing a financial incentive to stay home does not automatically create a pathway into the labour market. You also need affordable childcare with available places, language courses without six-month waitlists, and someone who can explain how Finnish society actually works, not in a government leaflet, but in a conversation with someone who has been through it. That is what community-based integration provides.
To be fair, EK does mention maahanmuuttajajärjestöt (immigrant organisations) once, in the exploitation section, proposing support for their ability to help victims who have lost their job or housing due to workplace abuse. But that frames community organisations as crisis responders, not as integration infrastructure. The distinction matters. If you only fund community support after something goes wrong, you are missing the opportunity to prevent things from going wrong in the first place.
EK wants municipalities to handle integration. Municipalities are already stretched thin, and the track record is not encouraging. Herizon helps roughly 40 people find employment per month with a fraction of the resources that municipal employment services operate with. We do this through community infrastructure, peer networks, and direct employer connections. Municipal services run programmes, file reports, and measure participation. The difference is that we measure whether someone actually got a job.
The proposal to reimburse municipalities for their new integration responsibilities is necessary, but the underlying assumption, that integration is a government service delivered through institutions, ignores what actually works. Peer networks. Community navigation. People who speak your language explaining Finnish workplace norms from personal experience. This is not a nice supplement to municipal services. For many immigrants, it is the only integration support that actually reaches them. Municipalities need to be able to fund community organisations as accredited integration service providers, with outcome-based contracts tied to employment, language progression, and social connection metrics. If a community organisation delivers better results at lower cost, that is where the money needs to go.
The job search visa could be the most important proposal here#
EK proposes a national tyonhakuviisumi, a job search visa with a points-based system to pre-qualify candidates before they have a job offer. TEM is working on a feasibility study due by summer 2026.
This could be the most significant shift in the document. It moves from "find a job, then get permission to come" to "come, then find a job," which is closer to how successful immigration actually works. But it also raises the stakes on selection. If Finland's integration services and higher education career support cannot adequately support the people already here, a job search visa without meaningful quality criteria will compound the problem.
The points system is where the design matters enormously. If it is calibrated purely on formal qualifications and salary expectations, it will favour the same narrow pool that existing specialist visa categories already serve. If it can recognise practical skills, adaptability, sector-relevant experience, and language learning potential, it opens pathways for the workers Finland needs at every level.
From what we see in our community, the people who succeed in Finland long-term are not always the ones with the strongest credentials on paper. They are the ones who adapt, who build networks, who learn the unwritten rules. A points system that cannot measure these qualities will replicate the same biases the current system already has. The feasibility study needs to include a pilot that tests weighted scoring for sector-relevant experience, prior integration in a Nordic country, and demonstrated language learning, alongside formal qualifications. Without that, the points system will just be another way of selecting people who already have options elsewhere.
EK also proposes that someone who finds work during their job search visa period can apply for a work-based residence permit from within Finland, no need to leave and re-enter. This is a practical improvement that would eliminate one of the more absurd friction points in the current system.
Immigrant entrepreneurship is the gap EK does not see#
EK's entire document is framed around employment, getting people into jobs. There is not a single mention of immigrant entrepreneurship.
In 2025, 72 people in Herizon's community were running businesses. 31 of them, 43%, started their company that year. These are not hypothetical entrepreneurs in a government programme. They are real people building real businesses, paying taxes, and hiring people in Finland.
Finland's immigration policy discussion treats immigrants as employees. EK's document is no exception. But when you have a community of nearly 3,000 people from over 100 countries, some of them are going to start businesses. And when they do, they face a system that has no idea what to do with them. Banking is a nightmare, business registration is confusing, and the residence permit system is built around employment relationships, not founders. EK does propose that the financial sector work with the Ministry of Finance to improve banking access for immigrants and new businesses, which is a step forward, but the entrepreneurship angle is otherwise completely absent.
If Finland wants 45,000 people a year, some of them will be entrepreneurs. The policy framework needs to include a startup residence permit pathway that does not require an employer sponsor, combined with practical support for navigating business registration, banking, and VAT in Finland. The infrastructure already exists for Finnish founders. It just needs to be opened to immigrants too.
Talent Boost and Finland's marketing problem#
EK wants to continue and expand the Talent Boost programme, extend it to worker-level roles (not just highly educated specialists), start Nordic cooperation on country branding, and ensure embassies and Business Finland promote Finland's attractiveness.
The instinct is right. Finland does have a marketing problem. Most potential immigrants have no idea what Finland offers. But the proposed solution is top-down government marketing through embassy campaigns, Business Finland brochures, and official Talent Boost programming.
What actually attracts people to a country? Other people. Word of mouth. Community. Someone from your country who is living in Finland and can tell you honestly what it is like, the good and the bad.
Herizon's community of nearly 3,000 people from over 100 countries is Finland's most authentic marketing asset for immigration. When someone from Nigeria or the Philippines or India is considering Finland, they are not reading Business Finland's website. They are asking people they know who have been there. A functional, visible community of immigrants who are working, building businesses, and navigating Finnish life is more persuasive than any government campaign.
EK's Talent Boost expansion to worker-level roles is overdue. The current programme's focus on highly educated specialists ignores the reality that Finland needs people at every qualification level. They also support adopting the EU Talent Pool, a Union-wide job matching system that could give Finnish employers access to a much larger candidate pool. Both are steps in the right direction, but the delivery mechanism needs to include community-based organisations, not just government agencies and embassies.
Faster permits for seasonal workers and asylum seekers will not fix employment#
EK has a full section on kausityöntekijät that deserves attention. They propose digital identity for seasonal workers, trusted employer register access, and expanding seasonal workers' right to work in other jobs alongside their seasonal role. This matters because seasonal work is one of the highest-risk categories for exploitation, and giving workers more flexibility reduces their dependence on a single employer.
EK also proposes bringing forward when asylum seekers can start working. Currently it takes three months with a travel document, six months without. Shortening the wait makes sense, but it does not change the underlying problem. Asylum seekers are the hardest group to employ: no language skills, unrecognised qualifications, no networks, and employers who do not know how to hire them. The current integration system cannot even place immigrants who already have work permits. If it does not work for them, it will not work for asylum seekers either. Bringing forward the right to work without a functioning employment pathway is a promise nobody delivers on.
Exploitation enforcement and the permit bottleneck#
The hyväksikäytön torjunta section, penalty payments for dishonest employers, better inter-agency data sharing, stronger enforcement resources, is the most operationally detailed part of the document. EK deserves credit for this. Business lobbying for stronger enforcement against exploitative businesses is credible positioning, and it is necessary if Finland wants to scale immigration without scaling abuse. They also propose registration requirements for invoicing service companies (laskutuspalveluyritykset), similar to what exists for payday lenders, which would close a loophole that enables some of the worst exploitation.
The permit processing proposals would be transformative. Right now, someone with a job offer has to physically visit an embassy, DVV, tax office, bank, and possibly police station in sequence. We see this delay employers and demoralise workers in our network constantly. EK's proposed two-week maximum processing time and automatic approval on deadline miss are the right direction. The next step is making the entire chain digital end to end, so that a single application triggers DVV registration, tax number assignment, and bank account opening in parallel rather than in sequence.
EK makes the case for why Finland needs immigrants, but not what it owes them#
EK's platform is a solid starting point. Faster permits, less bureaucracy, digital identity infrastructure, better credential recognition. All of these need to happen.
But Finland's immigration challenge is not just about getting people through the door. It is about what happens after. As long as municipal employment services and higher education career support perform this poorly, Finland needs to be far more deliberate about who it recruits and how prepared they are to succeed here.
Employers need to own workplace integration, not as a government-funded programme they can opt into, but as a core business function. Structured onboarding that addresses cultural expectations. Retention tracking. Manager training for international teams. The companies that do this well retain their international hires. The ones that do not contribute to the revolving door.
The incentive structure matters too. When employment services are paid regardless of whether anyone gets a job, there is no pressure to improve. When payment is tied to actual employment outcomes, the entire system has to perform. This applies to municipalities, to private service providers, to higher education institutions, and to every programme that claims to help people find work. If a programme runs for years without producing measurable job placements, it needs to lose its funding. The organisations that deliver results need to be the ones that get resourced.
Peer networks, cultural navigation, and practical support from organisations like Herizon do not appear anywhere in EK's vision. Everything flows through municipalities and government services. But municipal services are not delivering results, and they cannot provide what a community of people who have been through the same experience can.
Post-placement support deserves as much investment as recruitment. The first 90 days of employment is the highest-risk window. If Finland is serious about retaining 45,000 people a year, it needs to be serious about what happens in those 90 days.
And the data infrastructure to track all of this needs to exist. Employment rates alone do not capture workforce stability. You need to track job loss patterns, re-employment timelines, and the revolving door effect. We do this at Herizon because you cannot fix what you do not measure.
EK has made the case for why Finland needs immigrants. The next step is showing how to retain them and get them employed properly. Concretely: retention targets and reporting obligations for employers hiring international workers. Published employment rates by higher education institution with funding tied to outcomes. Outcome-based contracts for municipal employment services where payment follows job placements, not participation numbers. And accredited service provider status for community organisations so that integration work does not run on volunteers.
