Making and Unmaking Migrants’ Family Relationships in Finland: A Study of Nordic Welfare State Population Registration and Statistics Production

Introduction

This article discusses registration and register-based statistics production regarding migrant family ties. Population registers and register-based statistics are characteristic of Nordic states. Historically, the establishment of centralised population registers was part of the institutionalisation of Nordic welfare states (Alastalo 2009; Bauer 2014). In Finland, it arguably constitutes the state’s basic infrastructure (Pursiainen 1993).

We consider population register-keeping and statistics production to be modes of state knowledge production, as theorised by Desrosières (1998) and Curtis (2001). That is, modes whose ultimate aim is to govern people through that knowledge. Like personal identification numbers, birth certificates, identity cards, passports, visas and social insurance numbers, register-keeping is a state infrastructural device, one of the ways that (especially Nordic) states attempt to make populations legible and thus governable (Scott 1998). Such register systems are common to the Nordic welfare states, yet, unresearched (although see Burrell & Schweyher 2021).

Legibility and governance are not straightforward with migrants. State policies and administrative measures are taken, and technologies (such as DNA tests and document legalisation) are deployed in order to ‘read’ migrant lives and bodies (Dijstelbloem, Meijer & Besters 2011) and include or exclude them from registers and statistics (Alastalo & Homanen 2018). In other words, the population that is visible in registers and statistics is shaped by prevalent power relations (Curtis 2001).

Finland’s population register, officially called the ‘population information system’, is a centralised national register of information about people, land, buildings and apartments, as well as administrative and other regional boundaries. It is supposed to include basic information about all Finnish citizens and foreign nationals residing permanently or temporarily in Finland. Public administration and private businesses use the register. Moreover, in Finland and other Nordic countries, population statistics are based on register data rather than on a census. The register system is often invisible to Finnish citizens, whose information is registered automatically when they interact with the authorities (e.g. at marriage, divorce or having children).

For migrants, inclusion in the population register is important for two reasons. First, for the individual, population registration means visibility to the public administration. The register is legally defined as reliable. This means that public authorities make decisions about individuals’ eligibility for social rights, services and benefits on the basis of register entries. Second, register entries have population-level consequences for migrants because register data is widely used in knowledge production, including population statistics. Authorities use these statistics for a wide range of purposes, including estimating the need for public services and employment-based immigration, planning and executing related policies, compiling population projections and informing wider public discussions. Register-based population statistics were previously quite comprehensive, but cross-border migration has challenged this. For example, population statistics are known to fall short with regard to labour migration from the European Union (EU) (Sorainen 2012).

We have written elsewhere about how migrants who reside legally and more or less permanently in Finland encounter difficulties in obtaining permanent resident status (i.e. registration with a ‘municipality of residence’) in the population register. This leaves them outside both municipal services and statistical visibility: regardless of one’s de facto duration of residence in Finland, permanent resident status is a prerequisite for welfare services and benefits as well as for statistical recognition. Asylum seekers from outside the EU face particular inequality when they are not granted permanent resident status in the population register (Alastalo & Homanen 2015).

Consequently, population registration can be viewed as a border control governance practice insofar as borders are not fixed to geographical places such as physical states. Rather, boarders are practices where belonging, citizenship rights and resident status are granted (or not) (e.g. Alastalo & Homanen 2015; Mountz 2010; Nyers 2006; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss & Cassidy 2018) and where families are constructed, reconstructed and performed as legal, administrative, social and biological entities by authorities.

We draw from and contribute to prior studies exploring (state) knowledge production about migrant family relationships and the control and management of migrants and migrants’ rights that knowledge production implies. Such research (at least in the affluent parts of the world) has largely focused empirically on family reunification practices. That is, on how and through what kinds of (knowledge) practices migrants’ relatives manage to migrate to and obtain residence permits and affiliated rights in particular countries (e.g. Heinemann & Lemke 2014; Helén & Tapaninen 2013; Rose 2007; Tapaninen & Helén 2019; see also Scheel, Ruppert & Ustek-Spilda 2019; Vähä-Savo 2020). Some research suggests that an interplay of different forms of ‘evidence’ of family relationships is involved in immigration authorities’ decision-making (Cooke 2022; Heinemann, Naue & Tapaninen 2013; Helén & Tapaninen 2013; Tapaninen & Helén 2019). Documents (or their absence), personal narratives, DNA and other forensic medical tests often play different roles and carry different weights in decision-making processes regarding family reunification.

The use of tests, documents and migrant interviews modifies and even makes up families, rather than rendering them ‘truly known’, as immigration authorities would have it (Hacking 2002; Helén & Tapaninen 2013; Tapaninen & Helén 2019). Further, authorities often strategically mobilise different forms of ‘evidence’ to diminish rights and control borders rather than to grant permissions and rights. This applies to migrants from less valued places of origin and with lower migrant status, such as asylum seekers from outside the EU in the case of Finland (Heinemann & Lemke 2014; Ustek-Spilda & Alastalo 2020).

This article sheds light on which familial relationships authorities enter into Finland’s population register, which they omit, and how all this is done. We also explore how familial relationships are represented in population statistics and on what grounds. Thus, in this article, we focus on the make-up of families at two interconnected sites and scales of population-making. Additionally, we ask what discriminatory consequences and violence these bureaucratic practices might have for immigrant families and populations (cf. e.g. Leinonen & Pellander 2020; Näre 2020).

As forms of state knowledge production, registers make some people and populations visible but not others. Bureaucratic registration and statistics production practices make individual people and population look different through different ways of making them ‘legible’. In these practices, the diversity of human life is strategically produced in a simplified manner, and some people are effectively excluded not only from measurement but also from social rights (Alastalo & Homanen 2018). The register/statistics production apparatus is thus performative of populations and social relations. Social realities and relations are enacted rather than merely described (Law 2004) – in our case, in line with immigration policy, red-tape bureaucracy and cultural norms regarding the family. State knowledge about immigrant families is made and unmade, depending on the site of observation. As state knowledge impacts families through social rights and policy, simultaneously, families are in a way made and unmade. We must therefore study the practices of both registration and statistics, because Nordic government authorities’ information is register-based and the information used for governmental decision-making and planning derives from register-based statistics.

We show that various forms of evidence, such as documents, DNA tests and personal narratives, serve distinct roles in the adjudication of registration decisions that uphold the paradigm of the (heteronormative/homonormative) nuclear family. However, the registration process heavily depends on official documents from ’reliable’ public authorities. As data moves from registration to the statistical office, familial connections absent from the register are abruptly brought into visibility and then restructured in alignment with the norms of the nuclear family. In our conclusion, we assert that the formation of governmental knowledge concerning migrant populations is not only subject to chance and randomness but also displays strategic intent.

Methodological Approaches to Governmental Practices

Our central research goal is to track how statistical knowledge about migrant populations is formed in the register-based statistical system in line with qualitative prior studies on knowledge production described above. Our methods to study this knowledge formation draw from multi-sited (Hine 2007; Marcus 1995) and state ethnography methods (Mountz 2010; Sharma & Gupta 2006). We have interviewed authorities and observed registration practices and everyday bureaucratic encounters at the Digital and Population Data Service Agency (DVV) service locations and statistical officers at Statistics Finland. In this article, our objective is to describe and understand the whole process of knowledge production as it is crafted in the legislation and policy that guides the practices and processes, and the actual face-to-face and statistics compilation practices at both the registration and statistics levels.

Our analysis is based on field notes, interviews, recordings and documentary material. Our fieldwork in its totality was conducted between 2012 and 2022. While most of the fieldwork was done in 2012–2016, we collected follow-up data by email and telephone interviews in 2017–2022 due to continuous legislative and organisational changes. Most of the fieldwork was conducted in a Kone Foundation funded project, ‘Mobile People – Challenging the Population Statistics and Projections’ (2012–2016).

We conducted fieldwork at three DVV service locations in 2012–2014, for 1 or 2 weeks at a time, according to the staff’s wishes. All three service locations were in large or medium-sized cities, with various educational institutions and reception centres in the vicinity. The fieldwork focused on registration work in a broad sense: meeting clients, entering information into the population information system and making decisions in challenging situations. In the spirit of ethnographic research, our aim was to see the registration work as a whole and client cases as processes rather than one-off visits.

We recorded a total of 104 instances of registration. Our recordings documented situations where different matters concerning registration were discussed, including the entry of familial relationships into the register. Additionally, we interviewed a total of 16 officers at the service locations and five officers from the Population Register Centre (now part of DVV). Our documentary material on registration includes legislation, recommendations and guidelines. This documentary material was used in many ways by our informants in registration work.

The material we collected at Statistics Finland consists of field notes on observations of the handling of population register data and five interviews conducted in 2013–2015. We also gathered documentary material on statistics, including statistical legislation, standards for producing statistics, statistical metadata (e.g. on data content and collection methods) and published statistical releases. We used this material to understand statistics production. We acquired formal ethical permission from the Register Offices’ Steering and Development Unit and Statistics Finland. We subsequently obtained consent from the staff in each institution. The migrants we observed together with the registration officials at the appointments were individually asked for consent for observation and audio-recording before their appointments.

DNA Testing: An Epistemological Break?

During our initial fieldwork, one service location accepted the results of DNA tests as proof of mother–child relationships in the absence of legalised birth certificates. Later, DNA tests for both maternity and paternity were accepted where it had been established that the migrant’s country of origin would not provide or legalise documents. A register officer described the procedure to us:

Initially, it seemed to us that an epistemological break was occurring in juridical state knowledge production practices. Historically, these practices only recognised a family relationship if it was based on and according to administrative documentation. By epistemological break, we mean that a new way of knowing family relationships and parentage has emerged. The new way of knowing through DNA tests, a relatively new method that emphasised biological and genetic ‘facts’. The historical way of knowing has been bureaucratic practices around documents and documentation that emphasised the role of the authorities as the producers of ‘true’ knowledge about family relationships (Helén 2014).

DNA tests and other forensic medical tests have been used in family reunification practices in Finland since the beginning of this century (Helén 2014; Helén & Tapaninen 2013). However, they were only adopted in population registration some 15 years later, albeit for the same reasons: for cases where people do not have the required documents or where the documents they do have are deemed unreliable. The reason for the 15-year delay may lie in this professional culture’s prevalent discourse, which treats registration work as a type of governmental bookkeeping regulated by specific legislation.

The argument for DNA tests was that the DVV wanted to prevent situations where an underage child would be entered into the population register without a legal guardian, since this might create problems with regard to child welfare, schools and social services. It might also affect the family’s eligibility for family related services and benefits. Even where a child is born and receives a birth certificate in Finland, the registration of the child’s relationship with the mother can be difficult if the mother herself does not have a municipality of residence.

At first, we considered the implementation of DNA tests to be bringing registration practices up to date with current realities and an attempt to change practices in line with international human rights treaties that are binding on Finland. Indeed, when DNA testing was first implemented for family reunifications in Finland, it was promoted in terms of human rights and specifically children’s rights, including their right to family life. Amid a general atmosphere of suspicion, where neither the immigrant’s word nor their documents (if there were any) were trusted, DNA tests offered a decisive alternative (Helén & Tapaninen 2013). Children have less say on migration than adults (Tyler et al. 2014). It is also cruel to exacerbate their situation by demanding original documents and legalisations that are difficult or impossible to acquire, not just because of politically unstable conditions, but also because some countries do not use official documents for identity and relationships (Heinemann & Lemke 2014). During discussions with us, however, DVV staff did not justify the use of DNA tests on the basis of human rights, although the child’s best interests were behind one local service location’s decision to start accepting DNA.

Testing can secure the rights and benefits of the most vulnerable people, that is, refugees. But it can also be used as a mechanism for exclusion and inequality: only a biological relationship can lead to a positive decision, and testing is strategically aimed at people fleeing the Global South (Helén 2014; Helén & Tapaninen 2013; Olwig 2022). Thus, DNA testing can make, unmake or modify family relationships and diminish social rights (Heinemann & Lemke 2014; Rose 2007). In practice, DNA tests have never been sufficient grounds for family reunification (Tapaninen & Helén 2019).

Both the discussion among expert registrars at the DVV and the eventual acceptance of DNA testing itself were surrounded by concerns about the procedure’s reliability. Authorities questioned its reliability because variations in laboratory practice might lead to discrepancies in results. Similar doubts rose earlier in the case of family reunification amongst migration authorities. Because of such doubts, Finland’s Immigration Services started to centralise the arrangement of DNA tests (Helén 2014; Tapaninen & Helén 2019). Another concern for DVV was who would pay for the tests if the procedure was accepted.

We later discovered that one of the service locations that used DNA testing in fact only accepted tests that had been ordered and paid for by the Finnish Immigration Service (for family reunification) or the district court. The officers told us that the idea was only to accept tests that had been arranged by another public authority. In other words, practices concerning DNA testing turned out to be in line with immigration services’ family reunification practices.

At present, DNA tests may in principle be conducted in any place that is deemed ‘reliable’. A register officer told us during a phone interview:

Thus, only tests conducted in public establishments actually qualify. In the words of one DVV lawyer,

Overall, although there had been a change in the juridical bureaucracy and the logic of knowledge production about families, the change was not as great as it first appeared. The primary importance of documents written by governmental authorities, and of communication between authorities about client cases, remained unaltered despite the entrance of DNA tests as a way of knowing family relations. De facto, only tests from a laboratory where Finnish authorities have centralised their DNA testing are accepted as proof of relationships. Furthermore, the nuclear family norm was enforced, as were exclusionary norms regarding the biogenetic family ties determined by DNA tests.

Family Statistics (Re)making Families Separated by Population Registration

Population and family statistics are a central form of knowledge through which state authorities, administrators and citizens encounter foreign nationals living in Finland. For many citizens and authorities who do not work with migrants, official statistics and publications based on them are among the few ways to ‘know’ immigrants – not as individuals, but as generalised within the whole population.

Family statistics are drawn exclusively from population register data, and as said, they include only permanently registered people like all population statistics. The criterion for permanent residence in statistics is permanent resident status (i.e. registration with a ‘municipality of residence’) in the population register. The statistical classification of families recognises the following types: married or cohabiting couples without children, married or cohabiting couples with children and single–parent families. Thus, unlike the registration practices, the family statistics recognise cohabiting couples as families, because the family statistics are based on (co-)dwelling and make families of people who live together. As one statistical officer put it:

In addition to family statistics, family relationships are also described in database tables of population structure statistics, which show the population by marital status. Population statistics categorise foreign nationals living in Finland by citizenship, country of birth and language. Otherwise, they are covered by statistics in the same way as Finnish citizens. Family statistics also categorise the citizenship, country of birth and language of the spouses and cohabiting partners of Finnish citizens and persons born in Finland.

Although family statistics and population structure statistics are based on the population register, the data in the register is not used as such. Rather, the statistical officers transform the register data into statistical data by checking, cleaning and curating before storing it in the statistics office’s database (for details, see Alastalo & Homanen 2018). For instance, at the end of 2021, there were 91,900 persons whose marital status information was missing in the register data. Practically all were foreign citizens. Their marital status is not registered, at least in part because of the DVVs document requirements and the difficulties migrants have in providing documents. In the statistical office’s data curation practice, they are deduced – or made – a marital status in the following way: a person is coded as unmarried if they have no children according to the population register. If a person has children in the register, they are coded as divorced. Because of this practice of deducing marital status, everyone has a marital status in the state knowledge of statistical tables.

A statistical officer described to us the practice of compiling family statistics as follows:

The ‘family program’ (a computer program logics) creates statistical families from the population register’s data on co-dwelling. Thus, the family statistics unite (i.e. deduce) the families of people who do not have registered relationships with their spouses or children in the population register entered by DVV officers. The marital status variable, deduced marital statuses, is used when family statistics classify families into married or cohabiting couples with or without children. In this way, foreign nationals with a deduced unmarried status in the statistical data end up as cohabiting couples in family statistics if they live with their partner.

However, the statistics do not create families out of all people who live together – only those whose age and gender conform to a certain couple-normative logic. Deducing family relationships based on co-dwelling is congruent with the two-generation family model enforced by legislation and established in administrative practice. The two-generation statistical family consists of parents and their children. This statistical (hetero)normative nuclear family model separates three-generation families into two families, or one family and one person living alone. The statistical deduction rules do not recognise same-sex cohabiting couples ‘unless the household-dwelling unit consists of two women who are the biological mother of the child living in the same dwelling and the second mother confirmed for the child’ (Statistics Finland n.d.). Further, cohabiting minors, people with an age difference of 16 years or more, and people living in institutions do not constitute families.

For foreign nationals residing in Finland, the most important practices in (family) statistics are those of deducing a person’s marital status and uniting families, including families who have not been able to ‘prove’ their family relationships with documents at a DVV service location. By taking people who are separated by the register and uniting them in the eyes of the law and the authorities, family statistics hide the fact that Finland’s administrative authorities do not recognise those people’s family relationships. The statistics thus not only describe but also organise social relations (Curtis 2001: 33) and rights.

Conclusions

This article has shown how family relationships are made, unmade and remade in Finnish practices of registration and statistics compilation. These Practices in general constitute the second step for migrants and migrant families in the process of being awarded (or not) social rights and incorporation into the welfare state. Such administrative registration and state statistics-building systems are common to Nordic welfare states, but little research on them exists (although see Burrell & Schweyher 2021). Our aim has been to explore state knowledge production practices and processes in the registration and statistical compilation of migrant family relationships and to see what the state’s knowledge/power to make migrant family ties ‘legible’ does. We have been interested in not just how the ties are constituted and ordered, but also across different scales of administration and policy. In other words, we have explored the consequences for migrant families at both an individual and a population level.

The conceptions of families that are realised in these knowledge production practices affect, in the eyes of the authorities, who can form a family and how that family is structured. As forms of governmental gatekeeping, registration and statistics have concrete and even violent impacts on the lives of migrant families – as does bureaucracy generally (e.g. Leinonen & Pellander 2020; Näre 2020). Our ethnographic perspective on the everyday work of government bureaucrats has enabled us to recognise the governmental red tape normative family logic. Through this logic, the state both knows about foreign families and governs and excludes some of them from the welfare system in a way that produces inequality.

Encounters with authorities at DVV service locations endorse the heteronormative/homonormative nuclear family model. This model is known through official documents provided by public authorities, and it is deeply rooted in legislation, bureaucracy and immigration policies and authorities. As Heinemann and Lemke (2014: 491) write, this produces a double standard of family recognition for native citizens and migrants. For instance, while welfare institutions recognise variety in ethnic Finns’ family relationships, such as common-law partnerships, migrants are required to fit a narrower juridical idea of the family. This is out of line with Council Directive 2003/86/EC (EUR-Lex 2003) – the EU’s most important legal document regarding migrant family reunification and rights – which leaves considerable room for interpretation regarding the concept of the family, the ages of minors and spouses, and the status of marriage as a prerequisite. This European legal framework should apply to all border-making welfare institutions.

The importance of officially authorised documents, combined with a general atmosphere of suspicion among immigration authorities, results in a situation where the immigrant’s word and even (depending on their place of origin) their documents and legalisations are easily mistrusted. Thus, our research confirms other studies’ findings that there is an administrative and political ethos of generalised suspicion across different institutions (e.g. Andersson 2014; Keskinen 2014; Khosravi 2013; Tapaninen & Helén 2015; Tyler 2013). The authenticity of documents from unprivileged parts of the world is treated as the most suspect. People fleeing war and persecution in the poorest regions are required to provide the most documents, which are extremely difficult and complicated to acquire and legalise (also Heinemann & Lemke 2014: 491–493). This not only requires excessive amounts of time, effort and money, but it also delays the registration of family relationships and the municipality of residence. This, in turn, can prevent migrants from receiving healthcare, benefits and social services.

How does the new practice of DNA testing help to constitute families in investigation and decision-making during registration? Prior research, which has focused primarily on family reunification, has found two coexisting rationales: human rights and border control (Heinemann & Lemke 2014; Helén 2014; Olwig 2022; Tapaninen & Helén 2019). This dual logic is also apparent in registration practices. First, the acceptance of DNA tests as proof of parent–child relationships and the easing of documentary requirements both indicate that Finland’s population information register authorities have the capacity to update registration practices in line with international human rights treaties. Second, if the DNA results deny any genetic parent–child tie, the rather narrow use of DNA testing in register practices potentially easily leads to restrictions on legal claims and rights and endorses a biological conception of the (nuclear) family.

This atmosphere of institutional mistrust is in no way fading. The discussion and acceptance of DNA testing in DVV service locations is defined by officers’ suspicions of the test process’s reliability, resulting in their only accepting tests arranged by another authority. Contrary to first appearances, then, DNA testing has not meant a break in the acquisition of documentary evidence from other authorities regarding family relationships.

However, it does complicate the interplay between different forms of evidence in decision-making about register entries and thus in social rights linked to family ties. Tapaninen and Helén (2019) point out that Finnish Immigration Services are characterised by a particular ambiguity with regard to the use of DNA tests in decision-making about family reunifications: test results may be taken as only a partial answer to the question of existing family ties, or they may be ignored altogether in light of migrants’ narrative or documentary ‘evidence’. In the case of registration, we see an interplay of different documents: DNA test result documents and legalised certificates of birth, adoption, marriage and partnership. Because these documents reflect different understandings of family ties at their origin, ‘decisions are left undetermined and open to restrictive trends in migration policy at large’ (Tapaninen & Helén 2019: 382). Suspicion easily wins the day.

In the shift from service locations to register-based family statistics, family relationships that are missing from the register are suddenly foregrounded, made visible to the state and reorganised according to the heteronormative nuclear family model. The information in the population register is managed in a way that not only makes families visible but even produces new family units from inferred marital statuses and family statistics based on co-dwelling. Although these ‘reassembled’ or even created families are not recognised by the Finnish administrative authorities, they are visible to the state on account of statistical practices. They therefore impact on the development of social welfare policy in the form of official Finnish statistics – that is, as state knowledge about populations residing in Finland.

Overall, in the process of state knowledge production about migrant populations, migrant families are recognised differently at the levels of individuals/administration and populations/statistics. This reveals a process that is contingent and arbitrary, but strategic: a (bio)politics that aims to know all, as well as border controls and care for some more than others.

Funding Information

This research has been funded by Kone Foundation in a project ‘Mobile People – Challenging the Population Statistics and Projections’ (2012–2016).

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.