Finland puts idle migrants to pick berries

HELSINKI: After the influx of migrants into Nordic countries since 2015, many have been struggling to accommodate the thousands of asylum-seekers. While most countries are struggling with bureaucratic hurdles, Finland has found a way to engage the refugees.

According to Finnish media reports, while various types of berries are found in abundance berry-picking becomes challenging due to the areas being infested with mosquitoes.

As summer arrived, Finnish food manufacturer Arctic Warriors was facing problems in collecting the thousands of kilograms of spruce tips needed for its new product.

That is when local asylum accommodations stepped in to fill the void with asylum-seekers who had nothing but time on their hands since schools were out for the summer.

​"They were really enthusiastic about the job. Just for the sake comparison: Finnish pickers harvest about 80 kilos of spruce tips on the average, whereas asylum-seekers got over 1,200 kilograms," Arctic Warriors product manager Katja Misikangas told Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti.

In 2015 alone over 32,000 asylum-seekers arrived into Nordic country, due to limited resources not all of them have been enlisted in the country’s employment service register, leaving them with no meaningful employment options.

Earlier, Finland’s Justice Minister Jari Lindström had proposed seasonal jobs such as berry-picking to help accommodate the refugees. The Finnish Interior Minister had also raised the issue highlighting that those on waiting lists should also have the opportunity to do some meaningful work.

While legal hurdles restrict those on waiting lists from engaging in work outside reception centers and often are offered cleaning jobs and maintenance work, the interior minister proposed abolishing the restrictions to benefit from the existing knowledge and skill-set of the asylum seekers.