SWI swissinfo.ch, drawing on Pew data: Switzerland's Muslim population was 6.1% (500,000) in 2016. With zero migration the share would rise to 8.2% (660,000) by 2050, to 10.3% (1,140,000) in the medium scenario, and to 12.9% (1,500,000) in the high scenario. Muslims are on average 13 years younger than other Europeans. Pew assumed a fertility rate of 2.1 for Muslims versus 1.5 for others.

A peer-reviewed article uses wavelet analysis to project a Muslim majority in 13 European countries between 2085 (Cyprus) and 2215 (Lithuania). Majority status would be reached in different countries in: Sweden 2125, France 2135, UK 2180. It assumes higher fertility (~1 more child per woman) and 2017-level migration (~706,000 asylum seekers/yr, 86% Muslim). The authors offer no uncertainty caveat about the time horizon — they call the mid-point scenario the “most likely” one and go on to describe concrete social consequences out to 2220. The method is signal processing rather than a demographic cohort model, and the rule used to grow the Muslim population is problematic: each five-year figure adds a share of the 0–4 age group to a share of the total population, although those children are already inside the total. The raised share is then fed into the next period, so the deviation compounds about 40 times by 2220. The model has no mortality, no age structure for the Muslim population and no fertility convergence. Compare this with the Pew and IIASA cohort-component projections.

The scholar of religion Teemu Pauha estimates that Finland had about 140,000 Muslims at the start of last year, growing by roughly 10,000 a year. The article covers the Muslim community in Vaasa, which has grown partly through international students — the University of Vaasa's international student numbers have more than doubled in a year — and prays in three rented spaces. The community would be interested in buying the Vetokannas church and converting it into a mosque. According to Edla Mäkelä, chief architect of the Church Administration, no church in Finland has previously been converted into a mosque. That church is not for sale.

Jerusalem Post: Registered Muslim membership in Norway grew from 72,000 (2006) to an estimated 197,000+ (2025), about +174%. Church of Norway membership, meanwhile, fell from 85% (1994) to 62% (2024).

The European Conservative reports Dutch demographer Jan Latten's estimate: Muslims would grow from about one million today (~6%) to 3–4 million by 2050 (~20% of a 20-million population). The estimate assumes migration continues at the current rate.

A report by the demographic observatory of San Pablo CEU University estimates Spain's Muslim population at 2.4–2.5 million at the start of 2025, about 5% of the population: roughly 3.6% first-generation immigrants and about 1.4% people born in Spain with at least one Muslim-background parent. About 11% of babies born in Spain in 2024 had at least one Muslim-background parent. The report attributes the gap to Muslim women's fertility being two to three times that of Spanish women. About 85% of first-generation Muslim immigrants come from Africa, and around 65% of the whole group is of Moroccan origin. Here too, this publication defines Muslim identity by country of origin and parental background rather than religious conviction.

A calculation by Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) puts the number of Muslims living in Germany at 6.6–7.0 million in 2025, or 8.0–8.5% of the population. The share is up 1.6–1.8 percentage points on the 2019 estimate, mainly because of migration from crisis regions in the Middle East. The largest background group is Turkish (39.4%), followed by Arab (29.4%). The Turkish share has been falling since 2008. The figure is an extrapolation combining first results from the 2025 microcensus with the 2020 Muslim Life in Germany survey. Muslims are counted as people with a background in Muslim-majority countries — both immigrants and their German-born descendants — rather than by religious self-identification, which is why the result is given as a range.

The main recruitment problems are that applicants lack teacher training, teaching experience or sufficient Finnish. A third of providers can and a third cannot give adequate support with current resources. Classes are often held in the evening, and only about half of the mother-tongue teachers worked with a preparatory-education teacher or a special-needs teacher. Teachers say quality would improve if classes were grouped by age and the syllabus were returned to the national core curriculum. The evaluation has effectiveness in its title, but the report defines it as the teaching's capacity and opportunities to support the intended changes, and the material is a survey. Learning outcomes were not measured, so whether the teaching affects language skills or school performance is not known in Finland.

The 2024 general grant was EUR 22 475 000 for foreign-language pupils and EUR 75 000 for Sami and Romani pupils. The same sum covers three things: Finnish or Swedish as a second language, other support for teaching, and own-mother-tongue instruction. The coefficients are public even though the split is not: the computed cost of a teaching hour is EUR 25, the grant covers at most 86 % of accepted computed costs, and own-mother-tongue instruction is funded for at most two weekly hours per notional group of four pupils. Two pupils form a group where four cannot be found.

In autumn 2025 the teaching reached 24 827 pupils and students, in 63 languages, from 85 providers. In autumn 2018 the figures were 20 732, 58 and 88, so participation has grown by about a fifth while the number of providers has stood still. The largest languages in autumn 2025 were Russian 5 931, Arabic 3 019, Somali 2 108, Ukrainian 1 746, English 1 361 and Albanian 1 206. Ukrainian grew from 105 pupils to 1 746 in three years.

From the 2014 survey on the work and well-being of people of foreign origin: three in four rated their Finnish or Swedish at least intermediate. The figure cannot be set beside MoniSuomi's 63% as a time series. The populations differ — UTH covered people of foreign origin aged 15–64, MoniSuomi foreign-born people aged 20–74 — and the question is not the same. The gap mainly shows that two self-assessment surveys do not make a trend.

A THL population survey of 7,838 foreign-born respondents, collected between September 2022 and March 2023. The question was put to everyone regardless of whether they had attended any course, which makes it the only figure covering the whole population. Of all immigrants 63% reported speaking Finnish or Swedish at least at intermediate level: 68% of women and 57% of men aged 20–74. The spread between background countries is steep: 89% of women from Estonia, 80% of women from Russia or the Soviet Union against 60% of the men, while the figure is 44% for people from South-East Asia and 40% for those from the rest of Asia, the Americas and Oceania. The regional pattern runs against expectation: 70–71% in Kymenlaakso, Päijät-Häme and Central Uusimaa, 60% in Helsinki and 59% in Western Uusimaa.

Breaks the MoniSuomi distribution down further than the combined share: about a quarter rate themselves excellent, about a third beginners, and about one in ten report speaking neither national language at all. Proficiency was weakest among those who came for work or study, who may not need the language day to day and some of whom are in the country temporarily. The page notes that survey data is needed because register data cannot measure language skills.

The linguistic target of integration training is B1.1, a functional basic proficiency. According to the review, a ministry survey of the ELY centres in summer 2024 found that in the training the centres purchased in 2022 and 2023, 32% of everyone who completed it reached at least B1.1 and about 60% stopped at A2 or below. Authors Risto Karinen, Taru Aihinen, Jenna Siltala and Olli Oosi. The cover is dated May 2024 although it cites a survey run that summer. The document was published in the government project portal in May 2025.

The conditions for a plan and the training that follows from it: the person is a registered unemployed jobseeker, no more than three years have passed since the first residence permit or the registration of residence, and they are able to take part full-time in services promoting integration and employment. The conditions leave outside the system those work-based migrants who are employed and their spouses, people at home with children, students, and anyone whose three-year window has closed.

The established form of integration training — labour market training lasting about a year — has 13,000–14,000 students annually, and the full-time training at folk high schools about 7,000. There were 610,148 foreign-language speakers in Finland at the end of 2024. Statistics Finland counted 57,000 students in liberal adult education aimed at immigrants in 2024, but those courses are lighter than the targeted integration training, and attendance says nothing about the level reached.

The profession's own background report on the lack of regulation: the law sets no competence requirement for an interpreter, so a single assignment may be handled by anyone. Only the title of court interpreter is protected, and the register the National Agency for Education has kept since 2016 exists, but no authority is obliged to use an interpreter from it. The report comes from an interest organisation and its proposed remedy is an interpreting act, but its description of the current absence of regulation can be checked against the law.

The wellbeing services counties spent EUR 35.3 million on interpretation and translation in 2024, about four million more than in 2023. The largest state buyers are the court service at 4.5 million, the Immigration Service at 3.8 million (2.9 million in 2023) and the Prime Minister's Office at 2.6 million. Municipal spending was unchanged. Part of the growth is remote interpretation, which has increased use. No one holds a total, because the purchases are not recorded in a uniform way. In Finland the right to service in one's own language does not depend on time in the country. In Denmark someone who has lived there more than three years pays for health-care interpretation themselves.

Natalia Tolmacheva, a PhD in economics, studied Finnish for seven years without reaching the required level, switched to Swedish and passed the test at the first attempt after ten months of study. She speaks mainly English in Finland. In 2022, 530 people took the intermediate National Certificate in Swedish against 6,869 in Finnish, and demand for the Swedish test has grown by about a hundred takers a year. Lidiia Salo, who prepares candidates for the test, says Swedish is perceived as considerably easier than Finnish. Saara Kalajoki of the National Agency for Education offers another explanation: the choice usually follows from moving to a Swedish-speaking region or a Swedish-speaking spouse. One interviewee, Kia Lindberg of the Helsinki Adult Education Centre, raises the integration concern.

Citizenship requires satisfactory spoken and written Finnish or Swedish, normally demonstrated through the National Certificate of Language Proficiency. The bill adds a citizenship test on knowledge of society from the beginning of 2027. The test would not be required of an applicant who has demonstrated proficiency matching the Integration Act's target level, B1.1, in at least two skill areas. That same B1.1 is the target of integration training, which 32% of those who complete it reach.

There were 285,360 Swedish speakers at the end of 2024, about five per cent of the population, and the number is projected to fall to 281,789 by 2030 and 260,973 by 2050. The distribution is uneven: about a third live in Ostrobothnia, where Swedish speakers are a narrow majority, and although the capital region has the largest numbers — 36,945 in Helsinki, 20,246 in Espoo — the share of each city's population is small. The compiler is an advocacy body for Swedish speakers, but the figures are Statistics Finland's.

“In Finland nurses' professional language skills are not tested at all. No such test even exists.” The law requires a health or social care professional to have sufficient language skills without defining what sufficient means, and only general proficiency is tested. Both nursing unions, SuPer and Tehy, regard this as a clear patient-safety risk. In SuPer's survey one per cent of respondents judged the professional language skills of those recruited from abroad to be sufficient. The unions blame employers' unwillingness to pay for language teaching.

A member survey run 2–22 September 2024 among members in employment, 3,255 responses. On the question about dangerous situations (n = 2,157), 14% answered yes, often and 39% yes, sometimes — 53% had seen dangerous situations caused by a foreign-language colleague's lack of Finnish. 23% had not and 24% could not say. Of the respondents 83% agreed partly or fully that a colleague's weak language skills are a burden on them. The open answers return to medication, record-keeping, understanding care instructions, and tasks shifting to the Finnish-speaking staff. The survey is the union's own, the respondents are self-selected and the question measures a perception rather than a recorded incident. SuPer is campaigning in the same document for a compulsory B2-level test as a condition of graduation.

An HS interview: Suvi-Anne Siimes, chief executive of Tela, the earnings-related pension providers’ interest group, argues that immigrants qualify for Kela pensions too easily and that tightening the conditions would encourage people to come to Finland to work at a younger age rather than arriving in old age to draw a pension. Entitlement to the guarantee and national pension arises after three years’ residence, and the full guarantee pension is about EUR 990 a month — the same amount for immigrants and the Finnish-born alike. This is the position of an interest group’s chief executive, not a research finding: the piece presents no calculation of immigrants’ pension contributions.

Helsingin Sanomat guest column: immigrants' lower employment rate and higher benefit use weaken the long-term funding base of the pension system.

The median hourly wage was EUR 16.75 for foreign-background employees and EUR 19.61 for Finnish-background employees in 2022, 14.6 per cent lower. Within an occupation group the difference is small and in places reversed: among managers the foreign-background earned 8.3 per cent more (EUR 47.07 against 43.46), among specialists 3.7 per cent more, and among professionals pay was about equal. Among service and sales workers the gap was 3.4 per cent in favour of the Finnish-background. The overall gap therefore comes mostly from which occupations the groups work in, not from pay for the same work.

The figures in this section and its chart are employed persons relative to the population aged 20–64, by background country and sex (tables 115t and 11rs). They are not official employment rates, because the employed include people of all ages. Comparison across groups is still meaningful, as the same definition applies to every background country.

The study links the Finnish Immigration Service's residence-permit decisions for 2011–2021 to Statistics Finland's registers, so it can follow employment by the grounds on which a person arrived. That answers directly whether work-based migrants are employed as well as the native population. They are, and at first better: in the early years of residence, employment and earnings among work-permit holders are higher than among Finns of the same age and sex, though the difference disappears fairly soon. After ten years the employment rate is about 80% for work-permit holders and EU citizens, about 70% for those who came on family or study grounds, and about 60% for those granted international protection. Earnings diverge more than employment does: at the ten-year mark work-permit holders sit slightly below their native counterparts, EU citizens and former students reach a little over 80% of native earnings, while protection and family arrivals remain below half. Two numbers are worth reading separately. The first is the starting point: at the end of the first year of residence only one in ten of those who arrived on protection or family-reunification grounds was in work, and protection arrivals earned 3% of Finnish-background earnings in their first full year in the country. The second is the closing of the gap: after ten years the difference in employment between work-permit and protection arrivals is down to 20 percentage points, against more than 80 in the first year. The groups converge from both directions, because work-permit holders' employment also declines over the decade. The authors' own most surprising result is that people who arrived to study do not reach the income level of Finnish-background people of the same age, even though they study mostly at universities and live in the country's most prosperous regions. Emigration is dealt with in the study and does not explain the differences. Within ten years 24% of study-permit arrivals leave the country, 19% of work-permit arrivals, 12% of family-reunification arrivals and 8% of those granted protection — that is, the groups with the best figures are the ones that shed the most people. The authors tested this by repeating the calculation on those who stayed for the whole period, and the results were very similar. What does belong with the figures is that the ground is the one a person first arrived on: a student may move to a work permit and a work-permit holder to permanent residence, so the groups are not the same people in the same positions a decade later. The data also misses 15% of permit holders who have no personal identity code in the registers, and the gap is largest precisely among study and work permits.

Work-based applications fell 25% and study-based applications 4% in 2025 from the year before, attributed to Finland's weak economy. The largest applicant countries were India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam and Thailand. About 180,000 applications were received in total, and 80% were approved.

According to an Etla report, the shrinking working-age population and public finances would require annual net migration of about 44,000, roughly a quarter more than the 2025 outcome of 34,852. The report names high taxation, negative attitudes and international competition for skilled workers as obstacles. The economic effects of work-based immigration arrive faster than those of humanitarian migration.

A meta-analysis of 97 field experiments and over 200,000 applications across nine countries. Discrimination was found everywhere, but its level varies: in France and Sweden a minority applicant has to send 70–94% more applications than a native one, in Germany and the United States 25–40% more. The ordering does not match the employment gaps: in the OECD's Settling In 2023 the gap between the foreign-born and the native-born is 7 percentage points in France and 16 in the Netherlands. The authors themselves note that the results contradict several established macro-level explanations.

A field experiment in which five equivalent applications were sent to each of a thousand vacancies, the only difference being the applicant's name. Winning the same number of callbacks as a Finnish name required 1.45 times as many applications for an English name, 1.71 for a Russian, 2.91 for an Iraqi and 3.94 for a Somali one. For men of Somali background the multiplier was 4.97. Every applicant was presented as educated in Finland, so language or the origin of the qualification does not explain the difference. The experiment measures the first step of hiring, not what happens after a job is obtained.

45 % of respondents had experienced racial discrimination within five years, against 39 % in the 2016 survey. The highest figures were in Germany and Austria, above 70 %. Those same countries measure as low-discrimination in hiring experiments, so perceived discrimination and measured employer behaviour are not the same thing and do not put the countries in the same order. Only 9 % reported the discrimination they experienced to an authority, so official statistics do not measure the extent of it.

People who fled Ukraine were spread across European countries close to at random, so comparing their employment says something about the systems rather than the group. In 2024, 65% were in work in Poland, 61% in the United Kingdom, 53% in Lithuania, 51% in Czechia and about 27% in Germany. IAB attributes the difference to ease of labour market access, language requirements, how long qualification recognition takes, the availability of childcare, and the level of benefits. The German model puts language training first, which pushes employment later. Three in four arrivals are women.

In July 2002 Denmark cut social assistance for newly arrived refugees by about 40%, leaving earlier arrivals at the old level. The design separates the benefit level from everything else, because the country, the labour market and the employers were the same. Employment rose from 10% to 19% in the first year, but the effects on earnings and employment faded after about five years. Poverty rose at the same time, and subsistence crime, mainly shoplifting, increased over the first five years by 5 percentage points among adults and 12 among adolescents. The cut was repealed a decade later.

An unemployment trap is defined as a participation tax rate above 80 %, and an income trap as an effective marginal tax rate above 70–80 %. The highest rates fall on single parents, on families with children where one or both parents are unemployed, and on people living alone. The effect comes from unemployment benefits, general housing allowance, daycare fees and the marginal tax rate acting together. The figures cover the whole population rather than immigrants separately. The mechanism reaches immigrant families more often than average because those families are larger and have lower incomes, not because the rules differ for them.

In the EU, people who moved from another EU country are employed more often than natives and people from outside the EU less often, but the gap arises primarily from women. In Poland, Czechia and Italy, non-EU immigrant men are employed more often than native men. The largest gaps are in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Belgium, countries with comprehensive benefits and a high wage floor.