Finns started to move to Sweden during the Winter and Continuation War. After the war people left for Sweden looking for better living conditions and some moved there for political reasons.

For Sweden this meant a population increase of nearly a half a million people.

SO WHY DID THE FINNS MOVE TO SWEDEN?

Many Finnish immigrants often could speak Swedish already before going there and in many places in Sweden were people from Finland.

The 1960s was the migrant workers’ time. Finns were hard-working and they could speak Swedish so they were wanted work force.

There weren’t many obstacles for moving. People didn’t need any passport or visa for travelling to Sweden. There is a treaty between the five Nordic countries which guarantees freedom of travelling and working in any Nordic country.

Many people thought they were going to Sweden to work there for just a couple of years and then move back to Finland but there weren’t any jobs available or places to live in Finland and the wages weren’t too good, either. So, the majority of Finnish migrant workers stayed in Sweden.

At the moment the Finns are the biggest group of the national minorities in Sweden. Their status is secured by the Minority Law.

The Finns have influenced a great deal in the field of social policy in Sweden and they have worked actively to improve the status of migrant minorities there. The Finns in Sweden form about a half of the immigrants in Sweden.

Finns have spread widely over whole Sweden but most of them live near Stockholm or Gothenburg.

Now there live about 200,000 Finns in Sweden. Over 100,000 of them still have the Finnish citizenship.

Maybe the worst thing about the emigration to Sweden has been the fact that many houses in the Finnish countryside, especially in the northern and eastern parts of the country, have been left empty.