The numbers and origins of people moving to Finland have changed significantly since the onset of Covid in 2020 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The country’s immigration policies have meanwhile tightened since the nationalist Finns Party joined the right-wing government of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) in 2023.
“Immigration from Asia has increased a lot since the pandemic began,” says Markus Rapo, a senior statistician at Statistics Finland. “Back in 2019, the top five immigrant groups by citizenship were Russians, Estonians, Iraqis and Indians,” he tells Yle News.
However, one aspect hasn’t changed in recent years: the biggest group of new residents has been Finns moving back from abroad.
In the first five months of this year, just over 2,600 Finns returned, with nearly as many Ukrainians, about 2,400, also moving to the country.
Since 2022, citizens of Ukraine have been allowed to move to EU countries with a special temporary protection status. This gives them the right to live, work, and access social and medical support in Finland.
“The number of immigrants to Finland has been highly affected by the war in Ukraine and immigration from there. But the number of immigrants in the January-to-May period, 16,275, is still much higher than it was before the war on Ukraine,” explains Rapo.
“Meanwhile, of course, the war in Ukraine has had an impact on number of immigrants from Russia,” says Rapo. Finland closed its border with Russia in 2023 amid suspicions that Moscow was pushing third-country migrants to Finnish checkpoints as a campaign of instrumentalised migration.
Besides Finns and Ukrainians, this year there have been smaller groups from the Philippines (1,009), India (726) and Bangladesh (633). This week the Finnish government said it is considering a points-based labour migration system such as that used by countries such as Canada and Australia.
More immigrants from Asia
Finland’s population has dipped slightly this year due to natural decline – in other words, more deaths than births – coupled with declining immigration, Statistics Finland said on Wednesday, citing preliminary data.
As of the end of May, the nation’s population stood at just over 5.65 million, down by around 1,700 people from a year earlier. The number of deaths outweighed births by more than 6,300.
Meanwhile, the number of immigrants dropped by a similar amount compared to the same period of 2025, though there were still more people arriving than leaving.
However, the year-on-year decline in immigration is “not a significant drop,” according to Rapo.
Over the 2016-2021 period, the average number of immigrants during the same five-month period was around 12,000 each year, he points out.
The latest figures show a large increase in arrivals from Asian countries.
In the first five months of 2019, that figure totalled slightly more than 3,500. That more than doubled to around 7,900 by 2024, and almost as many again last year.
That pace has slackened a bit so far this year, with at least 6,770 Asians moving to Finland, but Rapo says that preliminary figure may be revised upwards later.
Dual residences in Finland and Estonia no longer legal
The latest figures also apparently show a surge in emigration to neighbouring Estonia – but that’s actually a statistical blip due to corrections in record-keeping.
An apparent surge in emigration to Estonia is actually due to updated figures for people who moved there from Finland in past years without notifying authorities.
“The number of emigrants is abnormal and due to the corrections made in the population register,” says Rapo. That follows a joint investigation by Finnish and Estonian authorities into individuals with permanent addresses in both the Finnish and Estonian population registers. The two countries have now set up an automatic data exchange to ensure that a person can only have a permanent address in one country at a time.
Besides Estonia, the top destination countries for emigration in January-to-May were Sweden, Spain, Germany and the US. Less than half of the emigrants were Finnish citizens.
Declining birthrate signals future economic burden
With the Estonian bureaucratic correction now completed, Rapo predicts that Finland’s population will show a net gain this year.
“As it seems that emigration flow has normalised in May, one can expect that our population will increase during the rest of the year,” he says.
Still, the fact remains that Finland faces a future where fewer younger people of working age will have to support an increasingly ageing population. Known as the sustainability gap, this puts heavy pressure on social security and healthcare systems, for instance.
While life expectancy has been growing steadily, there have been more deaths than births in Finland every year since 2016.
“This is due to the age structure of the population and declined fertility. There has been very slight increase in the total fertility rate, but it’s still almost 30 percent lower than in 2010,” says Rapo.
“Therefore, the increase in population has been up to net immigration,” he points out.
