Enacting the border multiple in the post-welfare state: Registration of foreign-born persons in Finland

Abstract

This article analyses border practices that are enacted through an array of migrants’ residence registration procedures in Finland. These practices extend to the country of departure and also take place upon arrival and settlement within a municipality, and they are intimately tied with the person’s access to social rights in the country. Building on critical border studies and Annemarie Mol’s idea of multiple ontologies we examine migrant stories, collected via multi-sited ethnography, that simultaneously testify to being targeted by diverse border practices and of being compelled to take part in doing the border. We address regulatory practices that modify and, indeed, reinforce inequalities between migrants. We argue that residence registration as a scattered border practice not only enacts different statuses for migrants but orders them hierarchically depending, for example, on the person’s migration status and nationality (EU/TCN). Furthermore, multiple regimes of knowledge production such as statistics on migrant population draw on the data recorded in the population register during the municipal registration process, which further extends the impact of this data. We show how the welfare state system, claimed to be universal, is highly conjunctural depending on the information the person receives from different interlocutors, and on the presumably apolitical “policy on the fly” enacted at the registration desk.

Keywords

Border migration registration multiple ontologies inequality

Introduction

Borders proliferate in the world. And this in turn accelerates the broad field of critical border studies which tries to capture the intricate workings of borders; for example, the ways in which border control is digitized (e.g., Glouftsios and Scheel, 2021) and extends far beyond territorial lines both inwards and outwards (Bialasiewicz, 2012; Glouftsios 2018; Maury, 2022; Mountz, 2004, 2010). As these studies have shown, demarcation takes place at various places, yet differently depending on persons’ diverse positionalities vis-à-vis the global border regime¹ (e.g., Balibar 2002; Braedley et al., 2021). We argue that one site where the border emerges and is enacted, is the local register office, and migrants are one group of ‘border doers’ who draw on their embedded, situated knowledge when doing the border (Rumford, 2006; Vukov and Sheller, 2013). With this site as a starting point we examine how our migrant interlocutors contribute to the doing of border during their process of accessing and settling in Finland, although they may only become aware of such doing only much later, if ever. We engage in discussions stemming from critical border studies that address the impact of the dispersal of state practices on immigration decision-making (Gargiulo, 2017; Paquet, 2015) – indeed, the dispersal and porousness of the state in general (e.g., Gill, 2009; Mountz, 2010; Painter, 2006). In what follows we discuss Annemarie Mol’s (2002) theoretical idea of multiple ontologies, namely its relevance in relation to critical border studies (also Scheel et al., 2019)² and specifically the so-called practice turn (e.g., Bigo, 2014; Côté-Boucher et al., 2014; Glouftsios 2018; Glouftsios and Scheel, 2021) within this scholarship.

In Finland, everyone has to register their residence at the local register office by having their information entered in the population register, the Population Information System (PIS). The PIS is a centralized and computerized national population register maintained by the Digital and Population Data Services Agency (the Finnish Digital Agency).³ It contains basic information about Finnish citizens and foreign nationals residing in Finland. For the registered person the concrete result of registration is a personal identity code: a number that consists of the person’s birth date (day/month/year), century sign, and a unique four-digit identifier – which is fundamental for any dealings with administrative bodies and, as our empirical material shows, also with many private entities. The personal identity code is often characterized as “magical numbers” (Leppäkorpi, 2011: 91) due to the wide implications of possessing one for the individual’s administrative existence in Finland. Obtaining this code is also one step towards accessing the right to the residence-based social security system in the country.

The kind of population registration we start our research from was for a long time typical only in the Nordic countries. However, similar identification schemes now exist across the globe, such as the RUN/RUT (rol unico tributario) number in Chile and Colombia. The advances in information technology and the rapid growth of computing capacity have also generated projects for demographic and biometric identification in Africa and Asia (e.g., Frowd, 2017), connected with aid and welfare provision programs. The most extensive undertaking is India’s Unique Identification (UID) scheme, which was implemented in 2010 (Carswell et al., 2019; Jacobsen, 2012). Moreover, the creation and expanded use of digital databases (Broeders, 2007; Broeders and Hampshire, 2013) that constitute a part of the supranational border regime in Europe include the Schengen Information System (SIS), Visa Information System (VIS) and EURODAC.

The article draws on our research in which we have traced the population registration practices deploying multi-sited (Marcus, 1995, 1998) and institutional (Smith, 1987) ethnographic research methodology that included participant observation and interviews at the register offices in three different municipalities, at a local low-threshold advice centre for migrants, at The Finnish Digital Agency, and at Statistics Finland (Alastalo et al., 2016). We applied and received research permission individually from each local register office in three cities for participant observation, interviewing officials and handing out calls for interviewing potential migrant interlocutors. We also applied and received research permission from the city where the low-threshold advice centre is located for participant observation and handing out information on our research project. Our migrant interlocutors either gave their contact information, or contacted us directly to schedule an interview. All our interviewees gave their informed consent in written form and the interview data has been fully anonymized. When reaching out to migrant interlocutors we aspired to include a maximum variety of migration statuses to investigate paths to registration across diverse migration categories, rather than limit our inquiry to a particular administrative category such as asylum-seeker, student migrant, or labour migrant.⁴ This choice enabled us not only to locate different ways in which the border is done but also to better understand the uneven function of the Finnish welfare state towards potential rights-holders.

We analysed our data by closely reading all interview scripts and field notes, then organized the data by identifying when and where the border was referred or alluded to, the agencies involved, and whether or not our participants understood how the border was done. We quickly noticed that our informants did not understand how registration is connected to the border regime and, consequently, what it means for their rights. In this article we discuss three sets of experiences by persons who have been positioned differently vis-à-vis the border regime. We chose these stories because they illustrate three different categories of migrants – an asylum-seeker from outside the European Union, an intra-EU migrant worker, and a person who moved from outside the EU combining the statuses of doctoral student and highly-skilled migrant – who were initially positioned very differently vis-à-vis the state and its migration regime. They demonstrate how our interlocutors live in unease between different enactments of the border and how they do the border themselves.

Firstly, we outline our approach combining critical border studies and science and technology studies. More specifically we think the border with Mol’s (2002) theoretical idea of multiple ontologies, meaning that ontologically different versions of an object are enacted. Secondly, we present the operation of the municipal registration system in Finland and show how it is connected to or coordinated with other forms of administering international mobility. In the third part, we proceed to the analysis of our material, selected to shed light on how our interlocutors gradually became knowledgeable about municipal registration as a part of the border regime and how they participated in doing the border. Finally, we draw conclusions that bear both on the empirical context under investigation and suggest implications for further research.

Multiple ontologies of the border

Here we bring together Mol’s theoretical idea of multiple ontologies with critical border studies, taking note that “theoretical import across disciplines is no smooth business” (e.g., Martin-Mazé, 2017). In her book Body Multiple, Mol investigates ethnographically how lower limb atherosclerosis is enacted differently in practices of professional groups – general practitioners, surgeons, and pathologists – at different hospital departments. For Mol, “ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day sociomaterial practices” and, consequently, “if reality is multiple, it is also political” (Mol, 2002: 6–7). Mol argues against perspectivalism – an approach that focuses, for instance, on the meaning-making of different professional groups and conceives of their perspectives on a disease as equals. Instead of different perspectives, Mol focuses on practices or events in which a disease is enacted, and how the different enactments are (hierarchically) coordinated. The multiplicity of an object does not mean fragmentation and pluralism but rather that the multiple enactments “hang together and present various forms of coordination” (Mol, 2002: 55). Thus, the object enacted is more than one – but less than many. Additionally, Mol shows how different enactments of a disease are spatially distributed, that is, kept apart in the hospital space.

Thinking about border regimes through this idea means that we should not see a border as an object that it is a coherent singular entity, but to study the border being enacted differently at different sites. For critical border studies that often seem to examine borders in plural, this means investigating how the border is made in everyday practices of (border) police, lawyers, office clerks and migrants, and furthermore, how this is spatially distributed and coordinated. We suggest that different sites of the border hang together and that this needs to be explored further.

Critical border studies question the existence of borders as territorial givens and have contributed to the emergence of what is sometimes called practice turn in border studies (Andersen et al., 2012), where borders are conceptualized as situated practices constituted in political negotiations, and investigated empirically as performed in everyday life (e.g., Mountz, 2010; Parker et al., 2009). In this regard, critical border studies align with Mol’s emphasis on practices. For the undocumented and people of colour, the border can be anywhere (Mountz, 2004: 342) yet it should not be assumed that the state is coherent in its bordering activities. On the contrary, border personnel (in the wide sense) struggle to reconcile “the deep contradictions and inconsistencies in the border control system that they are responsible for” (Burridge et al., 2017: 243). This inconsistency forms a starting point that leads one to explore how the border is done and upheld in the mundane practices of diverse professional groups, and how migrants are part of this doing, understood broadly as ‘borderwork’ (Rumford, 2006; Vukov and Sheller, 2013). Mol’s idea of multiplicity enables us to explore how the border is distributed and coordinated (Brambilla, 2015; Sohn, 2016).

Moreover, borders not only demarcate and exclude some populations but they also have an inclusive function. As Mezzadra and Neilson (2013: 7) argue, “borders are equally devices of inclusion that select and filter people and different forms of circulation in ways no less violent than those deployed in exclusionary measures”, thereby highlighting that, rather than being opposites, inclusion needs to be understood as existing on a continuum with exclusion (also Gargiulo, 2017). From this analytical perspective, the border functions to hierarchize and stratify rather than simply exclude; an understanding that captures the way in which we approach our material on the workings of regulatory practices in migrants’ lives where we focus, following Mol, on how this hierarchization is done by the different interlocutors involved.

In this article, we think with Mol’s work and analyse our migrant interlocutors’ stories (Mol, 2002: 20) of doing the border. Whilst in her 2002 book Mol focuses on medicine as professional practice and leaves patients aside (2002: 26; though returning to them in her later work in Mol, 2008), we concentrate on events told by those who have undergone the bordering process. We argue that our interlocutors not only conceive differently what registration entails but have done the border differently each time they have encountered it.

Municipal registration as a part of the border regime in Finland

Once in Finland, the first two steps of borderwork (Rumford, 2006; Vukov and Sheller, 2013) for a person who has arrived with the intention of staying are to register at the Finnish Immigration Service (until 2017 at the police station) and then the Finnish Digital Agency’s service location (local register office)⁵. European Union citizens only need to register at the Finnish Immigration Service if their stay exceeds 3 months. A residence permit is compulsory for third country nationals who require formal permission to enter Finland, and those who benefit from visa-free stay for 3 months but who, for example, undertake long-term studies in Finland. For asylum seekers municipal registration is only possible after they have received a positive decision on their asylum claim and access to a residence permit. Alongside being secondary in the temporal order, municipal registration is connected to and hierarchically subordinate to the rest of the border regime, especially the possession (or not) of a residence permit and the category within which it is assigned. Visiting the local register office denotes one way of coming into contact with locally situated, dispersed state authority (Gargiulo, 2017; Painter, 2006). Prior to the visit, however, the person aspiring to move to Finland might have already entered into contact with the Finnish state through the visa application process. Passports and visa application processes – and visa refusals for particularly gendered and racialized persons – constitute a technique through which borders are created and upheld (e.g., Salter, 2006; Satzewich, 2014). They form an integral part of borderwork at distance.

To get their personal data entered into the PIS, a person must provide legalized documents on their identity and family relations, because according to the law (Act 2009), register entries can be acted upon in public administration as facts about individuals. As already mentioned, registered persons are assigned a personal identity code through which the individual’s personal details can be accessed by public administration and private businesses. Since the early 1970s, Finnish nationals have received their personal identity code at birth which, despite its being constantly required in diverse settings, has rendered its use an automatic form of borderwork (Rumford, 2006; Vukov and Sheller, 2013), and an invisible bordering technique for citizens. Due to its emergence in the 1960s as a part of social insurance procedure (Alastalo and Helén 2022), the number is still commonly but inaccurately referred to as a social security number, although alone it does not guarantee the access to social rights that this term would indicate. It continues to be crucial, however, as it is necessary for interactions with public administration and various private entities ranging from public health care institutions and schools, to obtaining a public transportation card. Thus, along with its function as a means of control and surveillance, municipal registration can be understood as enacting the right to administrative existence and thereby conforming to the inclusive function of the border (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 7). The personal identity code works as a device that, firstly, provides the registered person with a strong administrative identity; and secondly, offers access to some or all of the information stored on the person in the digital PIS database to its administrative or private business users.

Registration is vital for a foreign-born person because it is connected to residence-based social security by producing different statuses for the registered – a person can be registered as a temporary resident with a PIN or as a permanent resident with a municipality of residence. Unless the person is registered as permanently living in Finland, they cannot have the right to access the residence-based social security system provided by municipalities. In addition to the local register offices, the permanency of residence is decided⁶ by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, the agency in charge of state-organized welfare benefits. Hence, mere municipal registration does not suffice for accessing full social rights in the country, but the regime is bifurcated. Firstly, local registration determines whether the person obtains permanent residency and thus has the right to access municipal welfare and other services. Secondly, the Social Insurance Institution decides if a person is eligible for national health insurance and can be issued the personal health insurance card (KELA card) as a sign of this eligibility.

As a digital database on people residing in the country, the PIS has also become widely used in knowledge production, including the production of population statistics since as early as 1970. From the beginning of the 1990s, the annual population census has drawn on the PIS data only. This means that what is entered or not entered into the register influences how the population is known. Yet not everyone with personal identity code is counted as part of the residing population, but only those registered with the status of permanent residents. Thus, temporarily registered non-citizens fall out of population statistics.

Welfare state systems identified as democratic and applying universally and equally to all residents have undergone transformations because of right-wing, neoliberal policies and this has led to hybrid forms of governance that are often referred to as ‘post-welfare states’ (e.g., Baeten et al., 2015; Larner, 2000). ‘Post’ does not denote a complete rupture with the past but to changes in the priorities of welfare state policy and the decentralization of welfare provision to the lower government echelons and the private markets. Along with this change, government becomes governance, where the state steers rather than itself providing welfare. Some researchers have interpreted that, along with these changes, the core of the Nordic welfare state has become obscured, whereas others argue that universalism has remained at the heart of the Nordic welfare state (Baeten et al., 2015).

According to our observations, for the office clerks filling in the seemingly innocent forms to complete municipal registration, the border is that set by the legislation and the ensuing administrative instructions they are to follow (Alastalo and Homanen, 2015). These instructions demarcate lines between those deemed to fit the category of a resident equipped with a full spectrum of social rights, and those whose presence is less welcome within, or completely excluded from the category of a full rights-holder. At the same time, for those who go through the registration process, the border appears and reappears unexpectedly almost anywhere, necessitating doing and redoing. As some of our interlocutors testify, this may also take place long after concrete entry to the territory.

Doing border multiple in migrants’ storied lives

On paper, in the instructions targeted at migrants for obtaining a personal identity code and the status of permanent resident in a municipality, as well as the administrative steps both preceding and following it, are presented as a clear and linear process. However, many of our interviewees recounted how, in practice, the process may take many unexpected turns: it differs depending on the reason for which and from where they arrived. Moreover, the systems they need to navigate require considerable tacit knowledge that may either be passed on by fellow foreigners or discovered with the help of friends or family members who are Finnish nationals (see also Saksela-Bergholm, 2014: 94). Yet it must be noted that for Finnish nationals who are registered in the PIS at birth the process is unfamiliar, and entering into contact with the various relevant administrations appears just as complicated as it does from the perspective of a migrant.

We now move on to three migrant trajectories of arriving and settling in Finland. We chose these stories because they illustrate experiences from three different categories of mobile persons initially positioned very differently vis-à-vis the state and its migration regime. Similarly to Mol, we read our interviews as they tell how living with the border is done. Consequently, we do not focus on narratives, feelings, meanings, or perspectives but on the events that our interviewees tell. These narrated events provide openings towards understanding the border multiple.

Fadil: Seeking asylum in Finland

Fadil came to Finland to seek safety for himself and his family. By the time we first met him at the local register office he had received a positive response to his asylum claim. Following this decision, he and his family were offered a placement in a municipality: they had found accommodation with an official address and were able to register as municipal residents. Local registration thus ended up being an easy part of borderwork (Rumford, 2006; Vukov and Sheller, 2013) for them.

Afghan by birth, Fadil had lived most of his life in Iran. When Iran began to expel Afghan nationals he and his newly-wed wife tried to move back to Afghanistan, but this proved impossible due to family tensions: his wife’s family had promised her to another man. The couple had to flee. First they returned to Iran, then crossed the border to Turkey and onwards to Greece with the help of smugglers, this last crossing denoting entrance to the EU via its external border. The island of Lesvos was the first halt in their journey in late 2008. Fadil was detained in one of the five men’s units in the infamous detention centre, Pagani, whereas his wife and their small child stayed in another unit assigned to women and children (see Alberti, 2010). After a month they received an order to leave the Greek territory, which denoted simultaneously an order to leave EU but paradoxically enabled their passage to the city of Athens (see FIDH, Migreurop, EMHRN, 2014: 75–77; Trubeta, 2015) and thus continue the journey onwards. Receiving the removal order exemplified one peculiarity of the border done nearby the external EU border that Finland is connected to, in that it was the only formally available way for them to leave the island. For several months they tried to survive in Athens before embarking on a further journey that took them by car to Sweden and then to Finland by ferry. The first thing they did upon arrival was to look for a police station and ask for asylum.

When they were arrested on the island of Lesvos, the family had their photographs and fingerprints taken but they had no possibility to make an asylum claim. These fingerprints, found in the EURODAC, constituted an administrative barrier to their access to asylum procedure in Finland: via fingerprinting “the external border follows migrants throughout Europe” (Mainwaring, 2019: 41). It is thus one example of how the border is a dispersed yet coordinated enactment. Finnish asylum authorities were determined to send them back to Greece under the Dublin regulations.⁷ Twice the family received a negative decision on their asylum application without their case even being heard. They appealed against these decisions and on the third occasion they were interviewed by the Finnish asylum authorities. Once again the decision was negative, but this time it stated that instead of being returned to Greece, they would be sent back to Afghanistan. After yet another appeal, the case was returned to the asylum authorities, and finally the fourth decision was positive. Ultimately, the family waited at the temporal border (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) of the Finnish asylum system for three and a half years, hosted in a reception centre in the Finnish countryside. These reception centres provide supposedly temporary residence for asylum applicants, yet the waiting times often prolong this temporary state for many years. This waiting can also be conceived as part of the constant process through which the border is done.

In his analysis of what he calls the “prosaic state”, Painter (2006) points to “the intensification of the symbolic presence of the state across all kinds of social practices and relations” (Painter, 2006: 758). According to our observations, this takes place in the opposite manner as well, through the involvement of private businesses in the actions generally conceived of as the domain of public entities. Some of our interviewees were confused by the fact that bank identifiers are necessary for accessing one’s information on civic registers and using various public e-services, especially as the mere opening of a bank account was not a matter of course for them. For people without formal passports, satisfying the mechanisms of proof of identity is an impossible task. In this regard, Fadil had been lucky: before moving to a bigger city, he had been advised to open a bank account in a smaller city nearby the reception centre. This he did, managing to open a bank account with just a personal identity code, and was thus able to handle welfare payments coming from the social security system. Nevertheless due to his temporary status at the time he had not received an internet banking option, which would have enabled him to manage his affairs with the Immigration Service and other public services online. Another occasion where a passport was needed was when trying to acquire a card that would offer more affordable access to the public transport system. Fadil had shown his residence permit alongside his national health insurance card (KELA card) containing the magical numbers of his personal identity code but that had not sufficed for the public transport office.

After struggling through the asylum process, obtaining permanent resident status and the KELA card were easy for Fadil and his family. However, had he not presented formal complaints against unjust administrative decisions in a persistent manner, the outcome of this enactment of border would have been very different: it would have resulted in a removal to Greece or even to Afghanistan; or staying in Finland undocumented, and therefore without access to administrative existence and most social rights, especially because of the digital border of the PIS. In this process the border was done as regulated by the juridico-administrative system, leaving Fadil little or no possibility other than complying with these timelines and procedures. Notwithstanding all this process, Fadil still did not quite understand what all these layered ways of bordering, such as permanent resident status, meant to him and his family.

Salme: A migrant worker in Finland

The EU has promoted free movement of EU citizens, and this ‘freedom’ is destined for migrant workers whose opportunities to cross the borders between member states have been facilitated by EU legislation. One of our interlocutors, Salme, a 41-year-old woman from Estonia, had moved to Finland to live with her Finnish partner intending to work to support herself. In principle, crossing the border between the two countries was facilitated by it becoming an internal EU border in 2004, and further eased by the Schengen enlargement to Estonia in December 2007. Additionally, Estonia and Finland have a mutual agreement to accept a population register extract as the basis for entering personal data into the population register of the destination country, instead of requiring separate legalized and translated documents (Treaty 2012). At the time we talked with Salme, she was permanently registered and had a KELA card.

Although Salme has a university-level degree as a kindergarten teacher and certified native-level Finnish proficiency, she ended up working as a cleaner on a construction site, attesting to how strongly the Finnish labour market is segregated according to a worker’s origin. Initially she did not get a work contract, proper working clothes or cleaning equipment, nor was she paid for all the hours she had worked; she even bought some cleaning products herself to perform her work effectively. She complained and was eventually fired after a period of sick leave before her probation period finished. Even though Salme did not need a residence permit, her story exposes the precarious position of people whose residence permit is based on working in Finland, a situation which can result in their continuing to work in inhumane conditions for fear of losing or not getting their permit renewed. From this perspective Salme can, puzzlingly, be perceived as privileged as her right to stay in the country was not endangered by the setback of being dismissed. Her Finnish skills enabled her to complain about the work conditions, although paradoxically her ability to defend herself probably also contributed to her losing her job. At the same time, while not affecting her residence, becoming unemployed rendered her potentially more vulnerable as she became dependent on her Finnish spouse. She mentioned that without her spouse she would have been obliged to move back to Estonia. However, despite her language proficiency and Finnish partner, she had encountered difficulties in navigating the administrative system. “It was like, I first went to the wrong place, I went first to the local register office while I should have gone to the police, and so I had to go to the police and then back to local register office”, she said.

Moreover, she had difficulties in getting a KELA card, which reveal the situationality and document bureaucracy of enacting the state border at administration desks. Indeed, welfare policies are increasingly becoming instruments to limit the mobility of certain intra-EU migrants (Lafleur and Mescoli, 2018). Thus welfare policies connect with and contribute to the enactment of the border multiple. On paper Salme should have been entitled to the KELA card, but at first her application was rejected at the local office of the Social Insurance Institution, which interpreted her stay in Finland as temporary and did not issue her with social security. The reason for this negative decision was that on the application she had listed her nineteen-year-old daughter, living in Estonia, as a family member for whom she was still receiving child benefit in Estonia. Child allowance is paid for a longer time in Estonia than in Finland where the benefit ceases at the age of 17, reflecting differences in welfare regimes between different countries (Kilkey and Merla, 2014: 216). The application form, however, did not have the space to note that the daughter though still eligible for welfare payments was no longer a minor, a fact that would have provided further evidence to the Finnish authorities that Salme’s stay in Finland could qualify as a permanent one.

Despite the difficulties she had met, Salme, like many of our interlocutors, was quick to emphasize that she had officially registered herself as a job seeker at the local employment office. It was typical for our informants to repeat that they wanted to do everything in an official and legal manner, participating dutifully in the required borderwork, as if to counter the feeling that they were suspected of being bogus in their daily encounters. In the context of invisible borders in Sweden, Khosravi (2010) writes that after obtaining legal status he collided with invisible cultural and symbolic borders that are not only difficult to grasp but keep people with migrant backgrounds on the threshold for generations. Moreover, he draws attention to the fact that, despite the difficulties they have encountered, many people who have been treated unfairly continue to praise the new country.

Aleksei: Working as an expert

The body of border studies has argued (and shown empirically) that border crossings are made smooth and easy for the privileged members of global elites (Sparke, 2006). Our third interlocutor, Aleksei, moved to Finland from Russia, a non-EU country, to work in a research group. When we met him he had already been living in Finland for more than 10 years. Back then his arrival in the country was made very easy for him. He did what he assumed to be the required borderwork together with his employer, who took him by car to the local register office, to buy a travel card, and to run errands with his landlord. Settling in was smooth, he described to us. However, when Aleksei decided to stay in Finland he discovered little by little that all necessary borderwork had not been done, but that there were further boxes that would have required ticking. Some of these omissions resulted from his very first visits to the registration desks at the police station and local register office. By the time we talked to him many years had passed since his first registration and he was not able to recall all the details of his encounters with the public authorities at that time. It appears that his employer had not informed him, and perhaps was not aware himself, of the longer-term consequences of the way in which he had completed his registration process. We do not know either whether his employer was a native Finn, or someone who had gone through the registration process for migrant residents himself. During our fieldwork we noticed that because of the invisibility and complexity of the border regime, native Finns are often just as unaware of how it works as migrants are, just as in Salme’s case above, and are thus not always the best guides to help navigate the registration process and the border multiple.

Despite the ease with which Aleksei had managed to do the border at the beginning of his life in Finland, he ultimately found himself in trouble. He explained at length his setbacks with residence permits, which mainly related to the precarity of his position as an expert; as is typical of Finnish university labour, he was simultaneously a paid researcher and a doctoral student. In this dual position his temporary contracts with the university were both grant- and salary-based, the latter being taxable revenue that, at least in theory, should have entitled him to social security. However, he had originally applied for a residence permit as a student on the grounds of doctoral studies and received a temporary residence permit with B-status and therefore no access to social welfare. Several years later he heard from a colleague that he would have been entitled to a permanent residence permit if he had applied for it on the grounds of employment and attached his work contract to the application. Thus, the way he had filled in the residence permit application effectively affected his status and access to social rights. At the time of our interview, he summarizes the peculiarities of Finnish bureaucracy by saying: “You need to understand what paper is necessary.” Similarly, he became aware of the existence and his right to a KELA card by accident, and only after living and working in Finland for 6 years. That happened when he was trying to get a bank loan and the clerk asked for his KELA card, to serve as a further indicator of a person’s ties to Finland. Obtaining the card was then only a matter of a couple weeks as there was no questioning by the Finnish Social Insurance Institution of his right to it. What these events clearly show is the arbitrariness of how people acquire even the most crucial information about the border, and what is necessary for doing it in the correct way.

We met Aleksei for the first time in a project-based information and guidance office where he was trying to find his way onto a Finnish language course. The Finnish integration law, namely 12 § of the Act on the Promotion of Immigrant Integration (Act, 2010), provides the right to participate in language courses during the first 3 years in the country to attain sufficient skills in Finnish. The working language of Aleksei’s international research group had been English, while his work had included travelling frequently back and forth between Finland and Russia, at times with several months spent at a research centre in Russia. Hence he had been obliged to interrupt the language course he had started while employed. However, his situation changed after he lost his job. As the 3-year time limit of entitlement to participate in the integration program had long passed, he had to find other ways to gain expertise in the Finnish language to improve his chances for future employability in the Finnish labour market. Aleksei was far from being alone in this situation: many people inquired about access to language courses when visiting the migrant information and guidance office. Understanding the language constitutes a form of symbolic border with concrete consequences for the access to information, and subsequently to formal citizenship.

In his story, Aleksei adhered to the neoliberal ideal of self-maintenance and independence (Sparke, 2006). He would not agree that his story symbolized a migrant struggle (cf. Könönen, 2018; Maury, 2022). When he told us about these events he emphasized that he had been a good taxpayer and had not lived on social security; indeed, he had not even needed health care assistance or had a KELA card before being asked for it at a bank. For this reason he thought that he should be more eligible for language courses than newcomers, as he had already contributed to society. Aleksei’s story also shows us that even people who belong (at least partially) to the global expert elite – the category that is in the most demand in the migration discourse – can lose their secure positions if they switch to another category. The permanent residence permit he finally received bound him to Finland, as he did not want to risk its loss by travelling to some other country in search of employment. He did not envisage moving back to Russia.

Doing the border multiple

In summary, it takes considerable effort and paperwork that feels endless (Carswell et al., 2019) to navigate the partially connected networks of public administration, to understand how the border multiple is done, and what kind of doing is expected from a person who seeks to become included. Moreover, it is often very time-consuming – as in Fadil’s case – even to do the necessary borderwork to get the statuses to which one is entitled, while accounts abound of even more complicated residence permit processes and difficulties met when a person does not fit the available administrative categories (also Kynsilehto and Puumala, 2015; Puumala, 2016; Könönen, 2018) and is therefore unable to do the border as expected by the authorities. While some of our interlocutors appeared to know their rights and what they needed to do – such as making appeals after being assigned a status they felt was inaccurate or unjust – the hierarchical relations between different border processes and the public authorities conducting them were obscure to many. These people had trouble learning what should be done in terms of borderwork, and why, and deciphering the functions of administrative actions. What is specific to the Finnish border regime is that, even though there are diverse points of demarcation and appearances of the border, the population register connects them all because the seemingly separate public authorities all have access to the information it contains (also Glouftsios and Scheel, 2021). Thus, the register is in use on thousands of desks and screens of public authorities who can at once see how and where a person is registered – for example whether or not they reside permanently in a given municipality. Since 2015 the type and duration of the residence permit is also entered into the register, which means that it operates increasingly and more explicitly as a part of the border multiple.

The Finnish border multiple and how it is distributed and coordinated became visible little by little to our interlocutors, typically after adversities and misunderstandings. Regardless of the reason for moving and where the person comes from, many of the problems people meet at various points of the border are surprisingly similar. A person can move to Finland in an expert position, as the skilled migrant preferred in many immigration policies across the European Union and beyond, and get help with border processes that reduce them to mere formalities, and yet still end up with similar kinds of problems to someone arriving in very different circumstances, as Aleksei’s case illustrates. The requirements of the register regime are most difficult for non-EU citizens to fulfil and they can be particularly harsh for persons who enter the country seeking international protection, such as asylum-seekers.

State and business life (i.e., the public and private sectors) intertwine in the Finnish border regime in unexpected ways that surprise many who encounter them. As noted above, one needs to have a personal identity code to open a bank account and, apparently, some banks even require the client to have permanent resident status. Certainly to get the bank identifiers required for paying bills online – which also serve as digital authentication for many public services – simply having a personal identity code is usually not enough. Furthermore, the Finnish Digital Agency provides services to insurance companies, banks and many other private business actors so that they can update their customer databases from the PIS data. Therefore people can also encounter problems with, for instance, insurance companies if their names and personal identity codes are not registered. To complicate matters further, as the public administration’s electronic services require online bank identifiers (increasingly difficult to obtain for certain categories of migrants), foreign residents must resort to expensive and inconvenient practices: the relatively high prices of administrative acts and cards, for example residence permits, have even higher fees if the application is submitted on paper rather than in an electronic format,⁸ and having to fit the short opening hours and time-consuming queues of the local register offices into working hours as best they can.

Many of our interlocutors mentioned that they always carry their passport with them wherever they go just in case they are asked for it. This practice seems to have become normalized and mundane, necessary to do the border in an effective manner in everyday life, because it guarantees a smoother passage for people who look like they have roots outside Finland. When on surveillance duty, Finnish police can request to see the papers of persons who appear not to be native Finns – though this assumption is not supposed to be based only on physical appearance.

Migrants are also in an unequal position when it comes to getting advice on their routes through the border multiple. Our interviews and observations, both at the local register offices and the migrants’ advice centre, illustrate how it was a matter of chance based on whom the person happened to ask for advice, and whether the applicant manages to ask the right questions, that lead in turn to further information about the necessary processes. The latter caveat is especially true in terms of dealing with representatives of the public authorities, who often refrain from proactively giving additional information that might not belong to their core competence area; refraining from advising the migrant on how the border should be done. Migrants’ advice centres were established to provide an easily accessible venue for gaining much needed information. However, they often work with limited resources while serving a clientele that seeks their help when other public services cannot answer a specific question. One recurrent example of these questions is the availability of language courses for those who are no longer entitled to the support provided by the Integration Law.

We found that migrants learned to know the border multiple – the impact the register could have and how it connected to access to social rights in the country – but only on a personal level. Meanwhile the population-level consequences, for example migrants’ in/visibility in the population statistics, was very distant and not at all known to our interlocutors. Nor are there, in Finland, any migrants’ rights activists or groups who could recognize and challenge the statistical policy- and administration-driven categories, unlike in the United States for example, where the categories applied in population censuses are far from being unquestioned. One reason for the remarkable difference in the mode of producing population statistics from country to country lies in the fact that in ‘traditional’ census countries the subjects being counted see the categories in the census form, but in the register-based census countries those being categorized do not see the categories used, or even realize that the register is being used in compiling statistics.

Although the register-based population count is considered very comprehensive, our fieldwork points to multiple challenges concerning the production of knowledge on the population of Finland. Firstly, because not all migrants have the required legalized documents to get their personal data and family relations entered into the Population Information System, there is a considerable amount of missing data from the PIS. The statistical regime deals with the missing data in variable ways, as some (e.g., nationality and state of birth) are shown as ‘unknown’ in the statistical releases and self-service databases, but some (e.g., marital status) are hidden by statistical imputations. Secondly, in the register-based population count registered persons themselves do not see the categories that are used, or even know that the register data is used in statistics compilation because statistics draw on data entered into the register by the public authorities. We argue that this is one of the reasons why the classifications used in the register-based population counts have not become politicized and ended up in the public debate in the same way as in the census-based population counts. In the census-based population counts, enumerators collect demographic data using census forms from people residing in a country. Therefore the counted subjects can see the ethnic, language and racial categorizations used, and can contest them (e.g., Kertzer and Arel, 2002). In the Nordic welfare state tradition, population data and the kinds of endowments that are generated based on this data continue to be under- or even de-politicized.

Conclusions

This article has discussed enactments of the border in the lives of people who have moved to Finland for different reasons. Through their stories, we have explored porous state practices that permeate different dimensions of migrant lives, wherein the border emerges and is enacted in sometimes unexpected ways for the person concerned. Demonstrating the usefulness of Mol’s theorization for understanding the phenomenon and the interface under examination, our material has evidenced that it is indeed a border multiple that is done and redone along our interlocutors’ trajectories in Finland. Another finding is that, regardless of the reason for entry and place of origin, people meet surprisingly similar problems at different points of their attempts to do the border correctly.

Throughout our project we have considered it important to continue dialogue with our institutional interlocutors to provide feedback that could improve practices at a faster pace than via traditional academic publication avenues. At the same time, it is undeniable that the constant changes in legislation affecting immigration and asylum, as well as the systemic level of the digital border, pose severe difficulties to all the different interlocutors – migrants, people trying to provide them with reliable information, and administration officials – in the navigation processes that we have analysed. In terms of future research, this produces the question of how to understand and analyse a highly volatile legislative and political environment and, more specifically, how to keep up with the ever-changing enactments of the border multiple.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our interlocutors and the Kone Foundation for project funding that made this research possible. We also wish to thank our reviewers for their helpful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Koneen Säätiö.

ORCID iD

Anitta Kynsilehto

Notes

Anitta Kynsilehto is Associate Professor (tenure track) at Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on global mobilities, gender, solidarity, and borders.

Marja Alastalo works as a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research draws on science and technology studies and focuses on diverse practices of knowledge formation. In 2012-2017 she led the project Mobile People, on which this paper is based.

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