How is rising unemployment level due to immigrants? All the unfilled jobs we have are nurses and builders/welders, few things immigrants can actually do; just like in the meme above, it's those so-called "entrepreneurs" who take benefit by hiring desperate people at fraction of their wage (that removes their right to get welfare, which is quite honestly barely above minimal wage now). Immigrants filled lots of underpaid and hard jobs that were otherwise vacant even in our tolerant society like toilet cleaners or berry pickers. I know a guy who became a cleaner like this, he had to actually spend some years getting formal education for that particular job! Immigrants get hired as farm hands only as "ok, I'll only hire you because you can do much more (build, weld, drive tractor, repair tractor, treat livestock, sort produce, etc.), at same wage". And they do actively throw away most of immigrants right now, just not those from Ukraine for now.

Don't get me wrong, Finland is in fact better than the most of the world in terms of immigration and current economic situation, all the depressing numbers tell us is that Finland is actually doing a good job of keeping statistics up to date. But it's still quite sad and also avoidable situation. There is no single political power responsible (we can see influence of every political alignment in damage done, and potential for every political force to make things better - except for Perussuomalaiset, screw those incompetent useless dorks).

We have high unemployment only because the economy is wildly mismanaged. We have these indirectly but quite obviously government-supported effectively monopoly distribution systems of S and K groups that just do protectorate bullshit (I've tried selling locally made chemical products through them, undercutting "made in China" by price, got total rejection due to "we reduce number of supply partners"); we have large farmers who stay competitive due to huge and wasteful influx of government money (like, one guy just got 2M+ Eur grant to build meat factory after showing that he has a few cows; no plan, no consideration for beef demand going down and ecology policies, to the fact that region is oversaturated with beef producers anyway with farmers who reached their production levels without government support of this level; the dude just hangs out somewhere outside of Finland mostly and his "property" is managed by another dummy paid by government separately) and contracts with monopolists that don't let smaller and more advanced players to even enter distribution; we have extremely poor logistics outside of big players (I've had delays with electronic components for months and nothing I could do about that legally - and no competition in logistics market); we have nonsensical manufacturing regulations tailored to favor big centralized production (like, legally requiring small time farmer to have full blood drain and sanitation facility to butcher one pig?). We have killed our small business (with business party in power, huh?), and relied on global trade to keep rolling entirely. Now that the latter is broken, we suffer.

This has absolutely nothing to do with immigrants; if anything, they at least prefer to shop local when they come here, bringing some life into dying economy away from major capital owners. I'm trying to get a job or a business running for over a year now (because I try to be proactive and consider both, also internationally, they've decided I'm not qualified for welfare, like, dude seriously? not that I care at this point, what good would welfare be for me when things are what they are); there is zero competition from immigrants, there is zero demand from market for anything at all but food (guess what, setting up a food sale point is not feasible anymore too https://yle.fi/a/74-20225046). You'd guess there is demand for defense? I've made an anti-drone device over a year ago, offered it to army, they were so happy but told me that ordering would take about 2 years, so I went bankrupt instead. Guess what, it's already obsolete, Russians and Ukrainians roll out new toys every month. I could've been upgrading the technology to protect us all, instead I just fill endless stupid fake job applications and am trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to feed my family. It's all disgusting farce, regular late capitalist churn with moomin franchise.

My town is full of immigrants who can't start their business or get a job, and old folks well beyond retirement age. Does this sound like a competition? And the government spends all resources on promoting xenophobia and boosting police to bust remnants of grey market trade (paying taxes but slacking on regulations) that keep economy from total collapse.

Nothing here is caused by immigrants; our economy desperately needs more of them, more of their hands to do the labor to make businesses pay more taxes so that we could pay the welfare to old and genuinely unemployed locals. Or immigrants ideas to open new markets, stay competitive for real - which is the only option when government support is not available. This is how I was, before becoming a Finn, years ago, when market was in much better state. I feel sorry for these poor folks now and blaming them for what we do here ourselves is just wrong.