Ethnic and religious aspects of immigration processes in Finland

The article analyzes the role of religion in the context of the contemporary Finnish migration system. The European migration crises have become a national challenge for Finnish society. The integration of (im)migrants, whose ethnic and/or religious affiliation is often opposed to the value-based and ideological foundations of Finnish civic identity, is accompanied by a number of problems. The most significant of them is the escalation of racism and discrimina-tion against migrants by Finns and social structures. The Finnish Migration Service (MIGRI) has been confronted with an unprecedented number of religious conversions from Islam to Christianity by Muslim migrants who use religious conversion as a way to gain asylum or avoid deportation to their home countries on the grounds of a risk of religious persecution. The Ecumenical Council of Finland has criticized the ambiguity of the methods for assessing the credibility of religious beliefs of newly converted Christians. At the same time, the in-creasing number of decisions to deport aliens to unsafe areas has divided the Finnish public into those who support accepting asylum seekers from Muslim countries and those who support anti-immigration movements. An analysis of statistical data and empirical material in the works of Finnish researchers shows that religious conversion is a popular migration strategy despite its low efficiency, the manifestation of Islamophobia in Finnish society to-wards migrants with Muslim background and the possible negative consequences of religious conversion from Islam to Christianity. The authors conclude that religion is an important as-pect of social consolidation and integration of foreign cultural migrants, but the formation of religious identity in school education largely contributes to the opposition of ‘us’ and ethno-religious 'others' in Finnish society.