On structural responsibility, good intentions, and who integration is really for.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that has no good name in Finnish. Or in any language, really. It is the feeling of sitting in a room where everything is functioning normally, where people are kind, where nothing is explicitly wrong — and knowing, somewhere you cannot quite locate, that you are not fully in the room. It is not dramatic enough to report. It is not concrete enough to prove. And because you cannot name it, you begin to wonder whether the problem is you.
This is not a story about people who did not try hard enough. It is a story about where responsibility has been placed, and why it keeps landing in the same direction.
The same pattern, at every scale
Picture a family dinner in Finland. A non-Finnish spouse sits at the table, navigating a conversation in their second or third language, catching perhaps every other sentence. The Finnish family members speak among themselves, not out of malice, but because it is easier, and besides, the spouse needs to learn Finnish. This is how integration works here. This is the unspoken agreement.
Nobody at that table made a conscious decision to exclude anyone. Everyone present probably considers themselves open-minded, welcoming, perhaps even proud of their international family member. And yet the burden of the evening, the effort, the confusion, the quiet exhaustion of existing in a language and a culture that is not yet fully yours, falls entirely on one person. The structure of the dinner table has decided, without anyone choosing it, who carries the responsibility for belonging and who gets to rest.
The same logic runs through the workplace. The non-Finnish employee is present but not quite inside the room: meetings move fast in colloquial Finnish, decisions happen in the corridor and the message groups that formed among those already in the conversation. When a new project needs a lead, their name is not the first that comes to mind. They are consulted, their opinion is noted, but somehow peripherally, as though their contribution needs to be filtered through someone else before it counts. A Finnish colleague sometimes speaks on their behalf, summarising their point, finishing their sentence. It is done with good intention. It communicates something else entirely: that their voice, as it is, is not quite sufficient. The assumption of incompetence is never stated. It accumulates in small gestures: the rolled eyes when a question takes longer to formulate, the well-meaning compliment that lands like a boundary marker: “You speak such good Finnish.” The question asked at a networking event with genuine curiosity and no awareness of its weight: “But where are you really from?” Each moment is small. Each is deniable. Together they form a texture that is impossible to ignore and almost impossible to prove.
After a few years, the non-Finnish employee leaves. The employer notes the turnover with mild concern and begins recruiting again. The question of whose responsibility it was that they left goes unasked.
It appears in the social worker’s office too, where assumptions about language and capacity get in the way of genuine understanding. And in the healthcare station, where the Finnish-speaking physician turns to the Finnish spouse to explain the diagnosis, not because the patient cannot understand, but because it feels faster, easier, less uncertain.
This is not a collection of separate incidents. It is one pattern, operating at every scale — the same unexamined assumption about who is sufficient, and who has the responsibility to prove it.
A closed loop
Since 2023, the refugee quota has been halved, the pathway from asylum to work permit closed, the residency requirement for citizenship extended from five to eight years. These decisions rest on a narrative: migrants are not doing enough. Not learning Finnish fast enough. Not integrating hard enough. Not earning their place. The responsibility to make it in Finland, in this framing, is entirely theirs.
But the narrative also works in reverse. When the pathway to a work permit has been closed, a person appears, statistically and politically, as someone who has not integrated. When citizenship requires eight years instead of five, a person remains officially an outsider for longer, regardless of how embedded in Finnish life they actually are. The policy produces the outcome that justifies the narrative that produced the policy.
This is not a coincidence, but a structure. When integration is framed as the individual’s responsibility, its failure is also the individual’s failure, and the conditions that caused that failure remain invisible. The loop closes. Structural responsibility disappears.
Researcher Tuuli Kurki calls this immigrantisation, the process by which people with vastly different backgrounds are grouped into a single category and held individually responsible for structurally produced outcomes. Sociologist Akhlaq Ahmad’s research makes it concrete: in a 2024 study, applicants with Finnish names were more than twice as likely to receive a call-back as equally qualified applicants with Somali or Iraqi names. The only variable was the name. The person did everything right. The structure decided the outcome.
The tools exist. So does the asymmetry.
Against this backdrop, and in full awareness of the labour shortage, Finland has built a considerable infrastructure for integration. Every migrant entitled to integration services receives an individual plan outlining what they must do, learn, and achieve. Every employer with more than thirty employees is legally required to produce an equality and non-discrimination plan.
The migrant gets a plan about themselves. The employer gets a plan it writes about itself. One is monitored. One sits in a drawer.
This asymmetry tells us precisely where responsibility has been assigned. Tools for integration exist: government platforms, THL accelerators, toolkits, researches. Yet the dinner table stays the same. The microaggression goes unnamed. The non-Finnish employee leaves the company after a few years. The self-assessment tool remains un-downloaded.
The tools for integration exist. The question is why, quietly and without anyone intending it, taking responsibility for using them remains someone else’s job.
Why good intentions are not enough
Part of the answer lies in how institutions understand their own role. The employers and institutions most likely to believe they are exempt from this examination are often the ones that most need to do it. An anti-racist mission statement, a diversity policy, a commitment to inclusion — none of these protect against reproducing structural exclusion. Anna Rastas named this pattern in 2009: En ole rasisti, mutta… (I am not racist, but…). The “but” is where the unexamined responsibility lives, just as comfortably in institutions that work with migrants as anywhere else.
Psychologists call one dimension of this moral licensing. It is the tendency for people who have done something good to feel implicitly permitted to be less careful afterward. Having the right values becomes, unconsciously, an exemption from responsibility. Migrants are invited to share their stories, hired for their cultural knowledge, consulted about their experience. Their presence is visible. Their faces appear in the communications. And yet the decisions, about priorities, about strategy, about whose voice carries weight are made by the same people who made them before. Migrants are given the appearance of responsibility without the power that would make it real.
Being invited to the table is not the same as holding power at it. And the difference between the two is rarely acknowledged, because the invitation itself feels like progress. But progress for whom, and decided by whom, are questions that tend not to get asked.
Where does responsibility actually sit in your context?
Following questions are worth answering honestly, alone, or with your team.
- When something goes wrong for a migrant client, patient, or employee in your context, where does the responsibility for that outcome land: on the individual, on the system, or somewhere genuinely shared?
- Who wrote your last equality plan, and were the people most affected by exclusion in the room? And if they were: was it a genuine transfer of power, or were they there to represent a perspective that others would decide what to do with?
- Who is currently doing the work of making your institution more equal and inclusive? If the answer is primarily the people most affected by inequality within it — that is not inclusion. That is the problem wearing inclusion’s clothes.
- And the hardest question: if the people you serve, employ, treat, or live with were asked privately whether they feel they belong, what would they say? And whose responsibility is it that the answer might be no?
Finland has built the architecture of integration. What it has not built is a shared sense of responsibility for whether it succeeds. The burden remains where it has always been: on the person who arrived. The family dinner, the workplace corridor, the social worker’s office, the doctor’s surgery, the equality plan that sits in a drawer. These are not separate problems. They are the same question, asked at different scales: who is expected to carry the work of belonging, and who is allowed to assume it has nothing to do with them?
The tools are there. The research is there. The responsibility has always been there too. The question is who picks it up.
Anna Lenkewitz-Salminen works as a regional coordinator for the Neighbourhood Mothers program at Nicehearts ry in Helsinki and writes about structural inclusion, immigration, and belonging in Finland. Feel free to contact her if you are looking for a speaker, expert, or workshop facilitator: anna.lenkewitz@nicehearts.com.
The ideas, observations, and arguments in this article are the author's own. Claude AI was used as a writing and editing partner to help shape and refine them.
Sources
Tuuli Kurki — Immigrant-ness as (mis)fortune? Immigrantisation through integration policies and practices in education. University of Helsinki, 2019. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/294719 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
Akhlaq Ahmad — When the Name Matters: An Experimental Investigation of Ethnic Discrimination in the Finnish Labor Market. Sociological Inquiry, 90(3), 2020. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soin.12276 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
Suvi Keskinen, Anna Rastas & Salla Tuori (eds.) — En ole rasisti, mutta… Maahanmuutosta, monikulttuurisuudesta ja kritiikistä. Vastapaino, 2009. https://vastapaino.fi/media/f/6859 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
Non-Discrimination Ombudsman https://yhdenvertaisuusvaltuutettu.fi/rasismi (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
Finnish Ministry of Interior — Migration policy reforms 2023–2024. https://intermin.fi/en (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
Act on the Promotion of Immigrant Integration — Entered into force 1 January 2025. https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/alkup/2023/20230710 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
Non-Discrimination Act (1325/2014) https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2014/20141325 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
toimirasismiavastaan.fi https://toimirasismiavastaan.fi (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)