Migration

Since 1860 over one million people have emigrated from Finland, most of them for economic reasons and virtually all of their own volition. Before World War II most emigrants went to North America (370,000), while the post-war emigration has been primarily to Sweden (502,000). Canada’s share of total emigration is about 90,000. In the first phase of Finnish emigration, Canadian destinations started to appear in the 1880s and were most popular between 1900 and 1930. After a seventeen-year freeze on immigration to Canada, the second phase resumed in 1947 and lasted till 1967, with smaller numbers coming since.

The first period of emigration coincided with a famine that revealed the shortage of arable land and its vulnerability to early frosts. People from the northern provinces of Lapland and Oulu departed first, for Sweden, Norway, and southern Finland, but in the 1860s North America became an alternative. Finland’s population tripled during the nineteenth century, and demand for food and farmland increased accordingly. By 1900 most marginal lands had been cultivated, the rural population (87.5 percent of the total) could no longer expand, and so surplus population migrated. Canada received two-thirds of its Finnish immigrants from the industrializing, formerly farming province of western coastal Pohjanmaa (Ostrobothnia). Turn-of-the-century russification curbed many of the privileges that Finns had enjoyed and led to strict censorship and conscription into the Russian army.

After the first emigrants from a Finnish village left, others soon followed, and some villages lost most of their young men. Females came next – sisters and friends of those who had left before. Most emigrants were single – healthy young men and women eager to work hard, spurred by recruitment brochures distributed by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the Canadian government and enthusiastic letters or stories heard through the grapevine.

Emigration resumed after World War I. After the Civil War in 1918 many former Red Guard supporters found Finland hostile, and fifty of its leaders, including the former socialist prime minister, Oskari Tokoi, left for Canada. This country’s popularity as a destination greatly increased during the 1920s, especially after U.S. legislation curtailed Finnish immigration. In 1930 Canada, too, shut its doors.

The second high period of emigration began in 1947, again dominated by Ostrobothnians but now joined by eastern Finns, dispossessed by the war and the cession of Karelia to the Soviet Union. Post-war Finland experienced rapid urbanization, a shortage of housing, and scarcity of well-paid jobs. Many people went to Sweden, but others turned to North America, though increasing prosperity in Finland reduced its share to fewer than four thousand for the 1980s.