All demographic forecasts indicate that the number of residents with a foreign background is on the increase in Helsinki and its neighbouring communities. Growth in the number of foreigners in the region is likely to increase further in coming years, prompted by the labour shortage that is expected as the first of the postwar baby-boom generation start retiring.

   

According to a cautious estimate, about 3,000 foreigners a year are moving into the Uusimaa region, most of them to Helsinki, Vantaa, and Espoo.

   

These three cities already have a total of about 50,000 people with foreign backgrounds - about as many as live in some of Finland’s larger towns.

   

The established communities and subcultures of different nationalities tend to attract others from different parts of Finland.

Helsinki has

more than 30,000 residents who are foreign citizens, or Finnish citizens who were born in another country - a total of 6.5% of the population. Net migration has slightly decreased in the past few years - apparently because of the housing shortage. About 1,000 foreigners living in Helsinki are granted Finnish citizenship each year.

   

Foreigners are also classified according to the language which they state as their mother tongue. Helsinki has 26,600 residents with a mother tongue other than Finnish or Swedish.

   

No statistics are kept on the ethnic origins of foreign residents. Some ethnic groups would like more detailed information on the ethnicity of the various groups.

   

For instance, many Kurds believe that there are more of them in Helsinki than the 554 that appear in the statistics. One possible reason for this is that Kurds come from several different countries, and that some Kurdish-born immigrants are in the habit of reporting a language other than Kurdish as their mother tongue; in some parts of Kurdistan, speaking Kurdish can actually be dangerous.

   

The officially reported number of Russians, 8,000, is also considered quite small. Keeping precise figures on Russians is difficult because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the different possible ways to classify the Ingrian "returning migrants".

   

According to Päivi Parkkinen, the head of the foreigners’ unit of the Helsinki Social Services Department, the figures are quite accurate because there are almost no illegal immigrants in Finland. "A large part of them get social benefits of some kind. You don’t get them if you are in the country illegally," she points out.

   

However, there have been cases of undocumented Russians and Estonians working illegally in the Helsinki region.

Helena Korpela, the foreigners’ coordinator

for the City of Vantaa says that it would be important from the point of view of schools and day care centres in the city to have more accurate information on how many residents have a foreign language as their first language.

   

"Statistics indicate that there are 6,500 of them, but we use the figure of 9,000 people with a foreign background. This is close to five percent of the population."

   

Korpela points out that this figure is open to various interpretations, because the oldest immigrants have been in Finland so long that they have received Finnish citizenship. Then there are children born in Finland, and others who are born into ethnically mixed households, and have one parent who speaks a foreign language.

   

Somalis especially have many young children, and they will soon grow to be the largest group of foreigners in Vantaa. Some Somali children are effectively third-generation immigrants in Finland. The Vietnamese are another well-established group.

   

A small group of Sudanese have recently arrived in Vantaa, and immigrants who speak Albanian as their mother tongue have also come to Vantaa, mostly from other parts of Finland.

In Espoo, 2001 was the record year

for foreigners moving into the city. The city got a total of 1,570 new foreign residents. In the same year 300 residents of Espoo moved abroad.

   

There has been no study of what may have caused the sudden surge, or of the background of the new arrivals. What is known is that one out of every three new foreign residents came from another EU country. Half of Espoo residents emigrating from Finland moved to another EU country.