Immigrants Are Not a Burden — They’re Building Finland

When the Helsinki Times reported that immigrants in Finland now pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, it didn’t surprise me. A new study from Diakonia University of Applied Sciences found that foreign-language speakers contributed a net €225 million to public finances last year. It’s the first time national data has clearly shown that immigrants are, in fact, helping sustain the Finnish welfare system; not draining it. (Read the full report here).

But behind these numbers are thousands of individual stories — people who learned the language, built careers, and made Finland their permanent home. That’s exactly what I explore in this interview series How I Learned Finnish. In episode after episode, I meet immigrants who arrived with no Finnish, sometimes as refugees, and who now work, pay taxes, and speak the language at a high-level of fluency.

One of them, Jojo Pratt, came from Ghana and spent his first year in a refugee camp. He learned Finnish by standing outside classrooms to listen and carrying a dictionary everywhere he went. Today he’s a nurse serving Finnish patients entirely in Finnish. His story, and many others like it, puts a human face on the numbers in this new report. Check out his story here.

Another example is my story In my case, I set out to get from B-level to C-level Dinnish fluency and achieved that goal in 1 year. 9 months after I started, I landed my first job that required me to work in Finnish - a consulting job in software development. Check out how I did it here.

The study’s authors said there’s been “a deliberate tendency to present immigrants in a negative light.” That’s why these real-life journeys matter. Language isn’t just a skill; it’s the bridge to full participation; to friendship, to work, and to belonging.

Finland’s future workforce depends on immigrants, but real integration happens only when newcomers are seen — and see themselves — as contributors. The data now proves it. The stories have shown it all along.

Listen to these stories of integration and language mastery on How I Learned Finnish — available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
I made this so that you can hear how they learned Finnish as adults and you can pick the methods that work best for you.