No man wants to be an Island: Migrants’ perspectives on the barriers undermining the formation of social ties with locals in Finland

We analyse the difficulties that migrants from non-EU countries face in the process of establishing social ties with locals in Finland. We analyse this in relation to three main activity status categories: being employed, being a student or being in integration training. By analysing 68 interviews, we identified three main barriers that our interviewees perceived to hinder their ability to form social ties with locals: lack of opportunities to form social ties within a shared social focus or to gain access to shared foci with locals, perceived cultural and social norms impeding the development of social ties in everyday life and life cycle and age-related factors. Although the availability of social foci and the kinds of ties those foci tend to support depended on the interviewees’ main activity status, our overarching finding was that, despite migrants’ strong desire to form strong ties with Finns, they either lacked ties with locals or all their ties remained weak and did not develop into strong ones. This difficulty concerned all interviewees regardless of their main activity status and persisted even when the interviewees shared social foci with locals, such as workplaces and study environments.