Young Swedish-Speaking Finns Turn Against Immigration - Now More Oppose Than Welcome

HELSINKI - Among Swedish-speaking young people in Finland, those who oppose more immigration now outnumber those who welcome it. Just two years ago it was the other way round.

That is the finding of the new Swedish-language youth barometer from Magma, the think tank of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, published in Helsinki on Tuesday.

This year 40 percent of the young respondents fully or partly reject the statement "More immigrants are welcome in Finland". Only 31 percent agree.

In 2024 the picture was reversed. Then 40 percent welcomed more immigrants and 29 percent were against. Magma itself writes in the report that young people's attitudes to immigration have hardened.

The survey was answered this spring by 1,373 young people aged 15 to 19 whose registered mother tongue is Swedish. The polling firm Taloustutkimus collected the answers, mainly in May.

Most boys now opposed

The gap between the sexes is large. Among boys, 53 percent are against more immigrants, up from 42 percent two years ago. Only 23 percent of boys welcome more.

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But the girls have shifted too. The share of girls who welcome more immigrants has fallen from 52 to 39 percent, while the share who are against has risen from 17 to 29 percent.

Looking further back, the change is even bigger. In 2018, 70 percent of young Swedish-speaking Finns said more immigrants were welcome, according to Magma's first barometer.

Linking immigration to violence

Fifty-five percent fully or partly agree that more immigration leads to increasingly serious conflicts and more violence in society. Only 15 percent disagree.

Just 19 percent think Islam is a natural part of Finland's diversity, while 35 percent reject that idea. At the same time, 41 percent believe racism among Swedish-speaking youth has grown in recent years, up from 39 percent two years ago.

In a comment in the report, youth researcher Jenni Kallio at Tampere University writes that the results can be read as attitudes hardening. She wants more anti-racism work and writes that "decision-makers have a special responsibility to counter racism".

Young people interviewed by the Helsinki daily Hufvudstadsbladet point instead to social media as the explanation.

Same trend in Sweden

Young people in Sweden have also grown more worried about immigration. In the report Unga tycker om andra from the Swedish government's Living History Forum, 45 percent of pupils said they were worried about rising immigration, up from 36 percent in 2013.

The Swedish survey was carried out by Statistics Sweden and is based on answers from 8,127 pupils in the final year of compulsory school and in upper secondary school.

Magma's youth barometer has been carried out every second year since 2018. The margin of error for the full sample is around 2.5 percentage points.