Interior Minister Mari Rantanen (Finns) on Monday laid out the government’s plans for stricter laws on gaining Finnish citizenship.
Among other factors, changes will be made to regulations regarding residence time, income requirements and probity – in other words having an unblemished record after arriving in the country.
She said that the government led by PM Petteri Orpo (NCP) is planning a citizenship test and a tougher language test.
"Finnish citizenship will be a reward for successful integration," Rantanen said at a press conference in Helsinki on planned reforms of the Nationality Act. The law has been on the books since 2011.
She insisted that the changes will "not be unreasonable, though".
The interior minister did not specify what level of income an applicant would be required to have to be eligible for Finnish citizenship. However, she specified that benefits granted by the Social Insurance Institution (Kela) alone will no longer be sufficient in the future.
"It should be clear that tightening the conditions and encouraging integration will mean that it will no longer be as easy to obtain citizenship as now – and that is the goal," she told reporters.
Finland to introduce a citizenship test
The government is preparing a Finnish citizenship test, modelled partly on similar tests used by other European countries.
According to the interior minister, the test will gauge an applicant's general knowledge of society's rules, the country's history and its political system.
"I guess the purpose of it is to find out whether the person understands the operating principles and values of Finnish society; that the person is actually oriented towards Finnish society," said Rantanen.
Minna Hulkkonen, head of the Interior Ministry’s Migration Department, noted that about half of EU member states use similar citizenship tests.
Applicants for Finnish citizenship must already pass a language test, proving competency in either Finnish or Swedish.
According to the government programme published in June, the residency requirement is to be raised from five to eight years.
Most EU countries require five years residence period as a condition for citizenship.
Only time spent in the country with a valid residence permit will be counted as part of the residence period, and the acceptable number of days spent abroad during the residence period will also be reduced.
The probity requirement is also being tightened. This means that a person must not have committed certain crimes in order to obtain citizenship.
At the moment, mainly serious crimes such as treason and terrorism prevent an applicant from being granted citizenship.
In addition, the government intends to make it possible to revoke citizenship if the individual commits a serious crime or turns out to have obtained citizenship by fraud, such as providing false information or concealing an essential fact.
Citizenship law "not decisive" for work-based immigrants
Rantanen said that in her view, work-based immigrants mainly evaluate the destination country's services, safety and level of taxation.
"This tightening will not be unreasonable. Of course, it might seem that way, since we have had a reasonably broad citizenship law until now. But I don't think the citizenship law is decisive in a person's choice of where to go to work," she said.
The conditions for citizenship are to be tightened through three legislative projects, to be implemented by the middle of the planned four-year legislative period.
The first bills could come before Parliament next spring.
Tougher immigration legislation has been a key policy aim of the nationalist Finns Party since it was founded in 1995. Party leader Riikka Purra, now finance minister, set it as a precondition for joining Orpo's government last spring.
With 109 seats in the 200-seat Parliament, the four-party right-wing coalition government is virtually assured of pushing bills through the legislature.
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