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comment by haystackoverflow
haystackoverflow  ·  2083 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Finland, home of the $103k speeding ticket

OK, kleinbl00, what rustles my jimmies is the word homogeneous. I'm so rustled that I actually bothered to register a new account because I couldn't remember my old one.

See, the table your source lists only accounts for 1st generation immigrants. 2nd, or nth generation immigrants are going to be included in the top category. So it doesn't give a very good picture. For example, 20% of kids under 7 years in the capital area have a foreign family background (Sorry, it's in Finnish only and as a new user I'm not allowed to post links, so here's a manual source link: stat.fi/til/vaerak/2017/02/vaerak_2017_02_2018-06-20_fi.pdf). 18% of people living in Vantaa have a foreign background. Third+ generation immigrants are no longer counted as having a foreign background, so 18% of Vantaa residents are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants. Sure, it's not as diverse as the US in terms of Mexicans per capita, but certainly that's not homogeneous by any stretch.

I can accept you calling the countryside, where 60% of ethnic finns live, homogeneous. But I find this irrelevant, partly because the police doesn't want to waste their limited resources on sitting by empty roads, and partly because there's not going to be any Mexican driving a Porsche around there anyway.

> If you get pulled over in Finland, it's because you're speeding

While the police is generally very professional, racial profiling is still an issue (English, check it out: yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/study_ethnic_profiling_in_finland_continues_despite_legal_prohibition/10142700).

> Nobody in Finland has ever heard "sorry, sir, I thought you were Mexican"

This is likely right, but "Sorry, sir, I thought you were Russian" probably isn't.





kleinbl00  ·  2083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Welcome!

I appreciate your input, and I appreciate you keeping me honest. At the same time, you need to understand that my neighbors to the west are Laotian, my neighbors to the east are Mexican, my neighbors across the street are Armenian and here in LA, at least, the odds that any service or labor staff speak more than broken English are slim.

Growing up, I had to cross thirteen separate native reservations if I wanted to play minigolf.

Rustled jimmies or no, you have not compelled me to reconsider Finland to be an ethnically diverse nation.