The sky over the forests of western Finland was glowing fluorescent violet and yellow. In early December it’s dark by mid-afternoon but this light wasn’t the aurora borealis: it came from the greenhouses of Närpiö (population 9,600, usually known by its Swedish name, Närpes), on the Gulf of Bothnia. Despite its harsh winters, Närpes produces half the cucumbers and 60% of all tomatoes sold in Finland, which has a population of just 5.6 million. The story goes that local people began growing these crops when a Finn who had gone to live in the United States returned after the first world war with a tomato plant. Now they hold a tomato festival every summer.

A quarter of the workforce – mostly foreign nationals – are employed in the greenhouses, earning €1,700-2,000 a month. The local authorities estimate 22% of the population were born abroad, making Närpes one of Finland’s most multicultural towns.

Last winter, the local language centre was fully booked. Around 30 women from various Asian countries, as well as Belarus and Ukraine, had come to join their husbands and were taking an integration course for foreign workers – Finnish or Swedish language classes were on offer, plus a hundred hours on Finnish society and culture. They had chosen Swedish, the region’s main language, which is spoken by 5% of Finns nationwide. It’s a legacy of the past: Finland was part of Sweden for 600 years, before being swallowed up by the Russian empire in 1809. It gained independence only in 1917.

‘I’m not planning on leaving’

‘I’ve worked in the greenhouses. Now I want a job in tourism so I can build a future for my kids. I’m not planning on leaving,’ said Xuan Tran, from Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. Her children’s school is a wooden building surrounded by birch trees. Staffan Holmberg, its headmaster since 1988, has had pupils from many different countries: Bosnia, Vietnam, Syria, Ukraine, Belarus. When I visited, the children were preparing (…)

Full article: 1 969 words.

(2) ‘Migrant Integration Policy Index 2020’, MIPEX, www.mipex.eu/.

(4) Sonja Pietiläinen, ‘ “They will not survive here”: Bordering, racialisation, and nature in the politics of the Finnish populist radical right’, Journal of Language and Politics, vol 23, no 3, 2024.

(5) See Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: on the Danger of Fossil Fascism, Verso, London, 2021.

(7) EUROSTAT, ‘European Union – Proportion of population aged 65 and over’, as of 23 May 2025, www.ec.europa.eu/.