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Pirkko Pitkänen & Satu Kouki (2002) Meeting foreign cultures: A survey of the attitudes of Finnish authorities towards immigrants and immigration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28:1, 103-118, DOI: 10.1080/13691830120103958

This article is based on a nation-wide postal questionnaire survey of the experiences and views of Finnish police officers, border-guards, social workers, employment agency personnel and teachers in their work with people of foreign background, and their attitudes towards immigrants and immigration in general. The data were analysed by factor and variance analysis. The results show that the attitudes of the authorities were, above all, related to their specific type of work and to the experiences they had had of immigrants as clients, which varied according to the occupation of these authorities. The experiences of teachers, social workers and employment agency personnel were mainly positive, whereas the majority of the police officers and border-guards estimated their experiences to be negative (or neutral).The most negative views were expressed by police officers and border-guards and the most positive by social workers and Swedish-speaking teachers.