4. These figures include both Finnish citizens and permanently registered foreign citizens. The three charts on mobility trends include data only on migrating Finnish citizens.
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
Yearly migration of Finnish citizens to selected EU15 countries 1990-2012 (a)
UKGermany Spain Denmark France The Netherlands Belgium
0 50 100 150 200 250
Yearly migration of Finnish citizens to selected EU15 countries 1990-2012 (b)
Italy Ireland Austria Luxembourg Portugal Greece
ChArTs 2A and B: Yearly migration from Finland to the EU15 countries (1990–2012) Source: Official Statistics of Finland 2013
This diversity in migration destinations is reflected also in Finnish migration research. While much of migration related research focuses on immigration to Fin-land (e.g. Martikainen et al. 2013b), in recent years a number of interesting studies have been published on Finns studying, living, working, or retiring abroad in various parts of the globe. Also Finnish researchers are thus taking part in the international trend of increased interest in migration research. As Adrian Favell (2008a, 259) has noted: “Such has been the explosion of interest in international migration in the past decade or so that no scholar nowadays can feel adequate when confronting the avalanche of literature that has followed”. I will not therefore go through all possibly relevant migration or migrant integration literature here, but just note the studies that are closely related to the theme of my own study. The research on Finnish migra-tion to non-European destinamigra-tions has examined, for example, the wives of Finnish expatriates working in Singapore (Oksanen 2007), the life experiences of alcoholic expatriate Finns in Australia (Vuorinen 2011) and the position of the Finnish
lan-guage in multicultural Australia (Lammervo 2011), Finnish marriage migrants in the United States (Leinonen 2011, 2012), Nordic knowledge workers in India (Foulkes 2011, 2013), and Finns working in Silicon Valley (Kiriakos 2010, 2011, 2013).
What unites these studies is a geographical focus on one country, region, or city.
The same holds true for most of the research conducted on Finnish migrants in Europe. These studies have examined the lives of Finns in Belgium (Lähteenmäki &
Aalto 2007), women married to Greek men in Greece (Järvinen-Tassopoulos 2007), retirees in Costa del Sol in Spain (Karisto 2008), the history and functioning of the Finnish community living in Switzerland (Björklund 1998, Björklund 2011), and place experiences of Finns in Ireland (Saarela 2011), for example. Some studies on migration between Finland and Estonia look at two different locations: in her doc-toral thesis Heli Hyvönen (2009) studied the lives of Finnish and Estonian women who had migrated across the Gulf of Finland, and in their study on migrant trans-nationalism Mari-Liis Jakobson et al. (2012) examine the cross-border ties that bind these countries and their populations together. In this study I focus on the labour market experiences of highly skilled Finns in multiple locations in Europe, so my approach differs from the studies mentioned above. Somewhat similar studies with a wider geographical reach have, however, been made, for example among expatriates on global careers (Jokinen, Brewster & Suutari 2008, Mäkelä, Suutari & Brewster 2013), on academic researchers abroad (Kulonpalo 2007, Hoffman 2009), profes-sional expatriates in various countries (Ruckenstein 2004), and on students complet-ing a degree in foreign universities (Garam 2003, Saarikallio, Hellsten & Juutilainen 2008, Saarikallio-Torp & Wiers-Jenssen 2010). As Finland both sends and receives highly skilled migrants, also research focusing on this target group living in Finland is of interest to my study as a point of comparison (e.g. Habti 2012, Korhonen 2013, Leinonen 2012, Eskelä 2013, Clarke 2013, Lulle & Balode 2013, Koskela 2013).
The 1990s has been called the first decade of internationalisation of education in Finland (Garam 2003, 4). Thanks to increased student mobility we at least in the-ory now have an international generation of Finns who should possess the neces-sary language skills and educational qualifications to succeed in an international job market. The increased interest in international mobility among the highly educated has been noted in other studies as well (Virtanen 2003, Koskinen 2005, Heikkilä &
Pikkarainen 2008, Heikkilä 2011). In this context the definition of highly skilled is generally understood to refer to those with a tertiary level degree, i.e. either a university or a university of applied sciences (polytechnic) degree. A study of 2,630 individuals who graduated in 2000 revealed that over one third of graduates from universities and one quarter of graduates from university of applied sciences had international experience, either from student exchange or from working abroad.
Three per cent of them worked abroad when the study was conducted in 2005 (Kivinen & Nurmi 2008, 51–52, 116). While the numbers of those actually realis-ing their plans of international mobility remain rather low, the effect of the Finnish EEA and EU membership in mid-1990s is clearly visible in the chart below.
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000
Outgoing migration of highly educated Finnish citizens 1990-2011
EU 27 countries Other countries
ChArT 3: Outgoing migration of highly educated Finnish citizens, broken down by EU27 / Non-EU countries.
Source: Statistics Finland 2012
The share of tertiary educated migrants of all Finnish citizens moving abroad has varied between 21 to 36 per cent within the past 20 years. In terms of num-bers, this has meant that 1,115 (in 1991) to 3,802 (in 2001) highly educated Finns have moved abroad each year (Statistics Finland 2012). On average during 1990–
2011 a third of all Finnish citizens moving to European countries have been highly educated. The table below depicts the share of educated Finnish citizens who have moved to the EU15 countries and to selected non-EU countries. The share of edu-cated migrants has been the highest among those moving to China (57.0%), Lux-embourg (54.5%), and Belgium (54.4%) and the lowest among those moving to Greece (21.2%) and Sweden (22.4%).
The table below thus also reveals that those with lower education levels continue to move to Sweden: 39 per cent of emigrating Finnish citizens who either had no education or had completed only a secondary level degree moved to Sweden (46,607 individuals during 1990–2011). Here it is good to note, however, that all of these Finns are not necessarily traditional labour migrants who would seek blue-collar jobs: many young adults especially from Finland’s Swedish speaking minority move to Swedish universities to complete higher education degrees.
TABLE 2: Aggregate figures of Finnish citizens moving to EU-15 countries and selected non-EU countries, broken down by educational level (1990–2011).
No educa-tion / secondary education
Higher education Degree
Total Share of educated movers
All countries 119,571 60,949 180,520 33.8 %
Europe 102,251 49,097 151,348 32.4 %
EU15-countries:
Luxembourg 551 660 1,211 54.5 %
Belgium 1,711 1,930 3,641 53.0 %
United Kingdom 6,602 5,626 12,228 46.0 %
Germany 6,602 5,457 12,059 45.3 %
Austria 733 599 1,332 45.0 %
The Netherlands 1,859 1,429 3,288 43.5 %
France 2,408 1,780 4,188 42.5 %
Portugal 384 262 646 40.6 %
Ireland 1,026 692 1,718 40.3 %
Denmark 4,431 2,458 6,889 35.7 %
Italy 1,818 932 2,750 33.9 %
Spain 7,220 3,495 10,715 32.6 %
Sweden 46,607 13,475 60,082 22.4 %
Greece 946 254 1,200 21.2 %
Selected non-EU countries:
China 756 1,004 1,760 57.0 %
Switzerland 2,192 2,121 4,313 49.2 %
Russia 700 537 1,237 43.4 %
United States 7,720 5,328 13,048 40.8 %
Thailand 543 318 861 36.9 %
Norway 9,198 5,023 14,221 35.3 %
Australia 1,567 846 2,413 35.1 %
Canada 1,495 768 2,263 33.9 %
Source: Statistics Finland 2012
More individuals move abroad than come back, as can be seen from chart 4, which depicts the numbers of outgoing and incoming tertiary educated Finnish citizens from 1990 to 2011. During 1990–2011 a total of 60,949 tertiary educated Finnish citizens moved abroad. While the number of returning citizens was 41,190, the size of the skill outflow, or brain drain was 19,759 highly educated individu-als in the past 22 years. It is good to note, however, that this data does not take into account incoming educated migrants, who are not Finnish citizens. It is also possible that a sizeable number of Finnish citizens who were educated abroad do not show in the figures as highly educated returnees because their degrees are not recorded in the Finnish databases that Statistics Finland uses.
5000 10001500 20002500 30003500 4000
Comparison between outgoing and return migration of highly educated Finnish citizens 1990-2011
Outgoing migration Return migration
ChArT 4: Outgoing and return migration of highly educated Finnish citizens