As confirmed by a comment to my previous article, Nordic workers moving to Finland also encounter problems whenever dealing with the bureaucracy. More specifically, getting service in the Swedish language apparently is becoming more and more difficult, in some Finnish municipalities, despite the fact that Finnish and Swedish both have an official language status in Finland.
This matches the findings of a committee where I was recently nominated. Among our team, we have a Free Software specialist from Åland. While the Åland archipelago legally remains a part of Finland for historical reasons, in practice, its inhabitants have always related more closely to Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia than to Finland. As such, our ålander encountered a much bigger cultural shock when he moved to Helsinki than when he previously moved to Reykjavik to live with his Icelandic wife.
Interestingly, most people think of EU versus non-EU nationals, when they think of immigrant integration issues and yet, EU nationals are not any more Finnish than non-EU nationals. This sort of opinion gets even more laughable, whenever average Finns presume that anyone from a Nordic country moving to Finland would have no difficulty whatsoever in settling down, simply because they relocate from a country that also happens to be of Lutheran protestant background and a political ally of Finland. This simply isn't true. As another comment in the same article suggests, there are integration issues with e.g. Swedes living in Norway and vice-versa. As such, I don't see how anyone could believe that Finland would be free of similar problems. Perhaps this is yet another case of Finns believing a bit too hard that their country is so great that they could not possibly experience the same issues that their neighbors have?
