Finnish Immigration Service and the new process

Changes in Finnish immigration service and in the immigration process

There was a time when immigrating to Finland was pretty easy when considering the EU-residence registration or residence permit applications. Every city had this service integrated to its police station and one could just go and do the identification process, give the fingerprints and leave the passport picture and just wait for few days and the application was treated and the permit was delivered. Sound pretty simple.

Since the beginning of the year 2017 all this changed. Instead of having immigration service in each city and town we have now nine immigration service points in whole Finland. That makes the processes very long and more complicated. What created a lot of delays in the beginning, was the growing number of immigrants since 2015 and the changes in the process 2016- 2017. All the files were transferred from the local police departments to the immigration service “Migri” database and a new program called enterfinland.fi which is totally a self-service program for all the applications coming in.

GMCFinland had first customers in the autumn of 2017, which was very interesting time. Start-up company, first customer in this changing environment. This Hockey-Player family from North America had been living in Finland for several years and each year they needed to renew the residence permits due to the fact that the player contract was renewed each year. This has been very easy before and the year 2016 was very frustrating for the family as the delay with immigration was so huge that they didn’t get the permits for all family members before they already needed to start applying for the new ones for 2017. That’s when the employer contacted me to solve this problem. In the end we got this done in the new system and they got their permits.

Since then, this particular process has become familiar for Global Mobility Consulting-Finland as it is our everyday life. All expats, immigrants, situations, families are different. There are as many cases as there are newcomers. If you know, that your company is sending you to Finland, or you have a new job in Finnish company, do not hesitate to ask a relocation package to be paid by your company included in expatriate expenses. That can be easily approved, and your company will be invoiced directly, without you needing to worry about anything else than your well-being and work in new environment.