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Finland Internal Migration
However significant the long-term effects of external
migration on Finnish society may have been, migration
within the
country had a greater impact--especially the migration
which took
place between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s,
when
half the population moved from one part of the country to
another. Before World War II, internal migration had first
been a
centuries-long process of forming settlements ever farther
to the
north. Later, however, beginning in the second half of the
nineteenth century with the coming of Finland's tardy
industrialization, there was a slow movement from rural
regions
toward areas in the south where employment could be found.
Postwar internal migration began with the resettlement
within
Finland of virtually all the inhabitants of the parts of
Karelia
ceded to the Soviet Union
(see The Continuation War
, ch.
1).
Somewhat more than 400,000 persons, more than 10 percent
of the
nation's population, found new homes elsewhere in Finland,
often
in the less settled regions of the east and the north. In
these
regions, new land, which they cleared for farming, was
provided
for the refugees; in more populated areas, property was
requisitioned. The sudden influx of these settlers was
successfully dealt with in just a few years. One of the
effects
of rural resettlement was an increase in the number of
farms
during the postwar years, a unique occurrence for
industrialized
nations of this period
(see Agriculture
, ch. 3).
It was, however, the postwar economic transformation
that
caused an even larger movement of people within Finland, a
movement known to Finns as the Great Migration
(see Economic Development
, ch. 3). It was a massive population shift
from rural
areas, especially those of eastern and northeastern
Finland, to
the urban, industrialized south (see
table 8, Appendix A).
People
left rural regions because the mechanization of
agriculture and
the forestry industry had eliminated jobs. The displaced
work
force went to areas where employment in the expanding
industrial
and service sectors was available. This movement began in
the
1950s, but it was most intense during the 1960s and the
first
half of the 1970s, assuming proportions that in relative
terms
were unprecedented for a country outside the Third World.
The
Great Migration left behind rural areas of abandoned farms
with
reduced and aging populations, and it allowed the creation
of a
densely populated postindustrial society in the country's
south.
The extent of the demographic shift to the south can be
shown
by the following figures. Between 1951 and 1975, the
population
registered an increase of 655,000. During this period, the
small
province of Uusimaa increased its population by 412,000,
growing
from 670,000 to 1,092,00; three-quarters of this growth
was
caused by settlers from other provinces. The population
increase
experienced by four other southern provinces, the Aland
Islands,
Turku ja Pori, Hame, and Kymi, taken together with that of
Uusimaa amounted to 97 percent of the country's total
population
increase for these years. The population increase of the
central
and the northern provinces accounted for the remaining 3
percent.
Provinces that experienced an actual population loss
during these
years were in the east and the northeast--Pohjois-Karjala,
Mikkeli, and Kuopio.
One way of visualizing the shift to the south would be
to
draw a line, bowing slightly to the north, between the
port
cities of Kotka on the Gulf of Finland and Kaskinen on the
Gulf
of Bothnia. In 1975 the territory to the south of this
line would
have contained half of Finland's population. Ten years
earlier,
such a line, drawn farther to the north to mark off
perhaps 20
percent more area, would have encompassed half the
population.
One hundred years earlier, half the population would have
been
distributed throughout more than twice as much territory.
Another
indication of the extent to which Finns were located in
the south
was that by 1980, approximately 90 percent of them lived
in the
southernmost 41 percent of Finland.
Data as of December 1988
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