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In 2007, a private recruitment agency started recruiting nurses from the Philippines to private elderly care homes and to operation wards in Finland. Although less than a hundred nurses have been recruited to Finland, the recruitment has received extensive media attention. Applying discourse analysis to the media data, the article analyzes the ways in which Filipino subjects were constructed by the Finnish media. We distinguish three types of categories relating to Filipino nurses as ‘good migrant/suspect worker’, ‘global commodity’ and as a ‘colonized subject’. The article argues that the discourse depicting Filipino subjects is a form of neoliberal postcolonialism, which combines a global geography of colonial power with a discourse of individualized economic risks and responsibilities.

While the Roma in Finland share history and national myths with the majority population, they have maintained their particular sense of identity. In spite of increasing recognition, manifested in legislation, their socio-economic position is still poor. This article explores the articulation of citizenship, identity and belonging among Finnish Roma. The study is based on conversation-like interviews with Romani activists. Recognising the marginalised position of Finnish Roma, the interviews are seen as a form of claims-making. The overarching narratives which evolve from the material point to a threefold sense of exclusion from full citizenship, entailing a material, symbolic and emotional dimension. While notions of the “good state” constitute a rather dominant and inclusive narrative, exclusionary practices are located in the area between the public and private realm.

The arrival of groups of Romani asylum‐seekers in Finland during 1999–2000 sparked an intense political debate, largely conducted in the press. The Finnish Aliens Act was eventually changed and ‘manifestly unfounded’ applications could be rejected in accordance with an accelerated procedure. By scrutinising the press debate on Romani asylum‐seekers this article sheds light on the articulation of various nation‐state dilemmas in relation to immigration control. Empirically the article draws on argumentation and claims‐making by different actors: political and administrative elites, experts, NGOs and the Roma. By the use of instrumentalist ‘common sense’ arguments, the elite actors point to the significance of protecting the Finnish nation‐state, but also of situating the young nation‐state in an international community. The marginalised position of the Roma is reproduced through their lack of space in the debate.

Implications from the restructuring of Nordic eldercare include the incorporation of new categories of care workers and a redefinition of the terms of citizenship and participation in working life. Drawing on the idea that policy actors script care worker subjectivities, this article examines print media as a key arena where the cultural imaginary of care work is played out. The media has the potential to accommodate ideological complexity through the possible range of participatory actors. From the scripts promoted through the mediascape, we can learn about the positions understood as being (in)appropriate for migrant care workers. This study draws on the analysis of news and feature stories from 2003 to 2013 in the largest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat, and in the periodical Kuntalehti, published by the Finnish Association of Local and Regional Authorities. The article points to tensions in Finnish media discourse, identifying ambiguous occupational scripts for migrant care workers—rooted in neoliberal repertoires of self-sufficiency and normative individualism on the one hand and helplessness and naivety on the other hand. It draws attention to an unsettling construction whereby migrant care workers are excluded from a long-term contract with the Finnish care labor market, and where social equality is conditioned to global redistribution.

In a time of welfare state restructuring, migrant background ‘stay-at-home’ mothers have become a politicised social category, constructed as unproductive and socially disengaged. The article examines the ways newly arrived women, who take care of children at home, enact and negotiate their own and their families’ early citizenisation process, with a particular focus on institutional encounters. Drawing on two case stories from the capital region of Finland, I discuss the dynamics of mothers’ claims-making for a transitionary citizenship, from the sphere of the home via social rights based public daycare to language training and education. I conclude that the constrained agency migrant mothers are subjected to, risks shaping a new gendered and racialised order of parenthood and ultimately of citizenship in the transforming welfare states.