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Comment by organicfigs | Hacker News Reader

After seeing so many posts on Finland recently, I feel an obligation to emphasize something (as someone who used to live in Finland): While it's safe, affordable, and definitely one of the best places to raise a family, it's nothing to romanticize. If you're not Finnish/Swedish, there's a lot of implicit racism and it's an upward climb for many aspects of life. I was speaking with someone pretty high up in the DNC: if you're an ambitious refugee, America is still the best place for you. You can drive taxis, pay for your education, and become a software engineer without anyone questioning you. I literally know a handful of refugees who got free education in Finland but were denied most job opportunities because of systematic racism.

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While I can’t disagree since I am not a refugee:

As a child of african immigrants I’ve been pretty fortunate to pursue what I want thanks to good school success (not amazing, but enough to make me a smart young adult).

The this country has too a very high bar for employment because of ubiquitous education. It’s probably very hard for a refugee from a country which doesn’t have schools that are known to be ”good”.

Could it be racism? Yes, I can’t deny that. But my family members and friends have not had trouble finding employment that matches their education level.

I think a place like Finland suffers from at the same time taking in refugees and immigrants as potential workers, but at the same time requiring too much skills/degrees for fairly simple work that shouldn’t require degrees, but goes to someone with a degree.

Moikka, I'm happy you've found a stable life. The thing is that subtle/implicit racism is quite difficult to pick up on. It involves not being:

* given the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations

* realizing how easy it is to socialize normally

* given a fair shake in a candidate pool

I, unfortunately, was a witness to many minorities not being given these benefits easily (not being one of them). Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" explains the mechanisms of these implicit biases well, and unfortunately, they're much more evident in Finland than most American metropolitan cities. It's difficult to pick up on them and unless you realize the hurdles in front of you, you're just built to jump higher without giving it a second thought.

The audacity for a Finnish refugee to think he's more important than a Finnish child.

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