That countries are what you would call "backward" -- high economic imparity, social injustice, institutionalised racism and inequality -- does not automatically mean that people who leave these poor societies behind are "backward" too. Quite the contrary. It's usually the intelligentsia, the opposition, the dissident class, people with more education, money and thus means to challenge the unfair systems and undemocratic régimes -- not the poor, uneducated and illiterate = the easily manipulated and oppressed -- who have to change scenery for their own and their family's safety and who have the actual means to do that.
As a consequence, the new Finns, the immigrant population in Finland, have more PhDs than ethnic Finns, and it's not like Finns en masse are poorly educated. The Finnish public transportation employees, 45% of whom are born outside Finland, are quite possibly the best educated in the world: they are university lecturers, economists, physicians, lawyers.
The immigrant population's demographic profile is also something to consider: it's more a pyramid than kite. When it comes to the immigrant youth, it would be stupid to complain that they are "backward" and undereducated. Well, duh. Kids aren't born with "an education": what we do is that we give them an education.
As an education-minded society, one of our recent challenges is that we overeducate our human resource and the over-education dilemma is even more pronounced for those foreign-born PhDs. We need to figure out how to translate their skills and education into Finnish labour market. Or more preferably, how to expand Finnish labour market to serve them, which in turn would serve us all. Bus drivers with PhDs is terrible waste of useful recources. At the same time, because of our demographic kite and overeducation, we need blue-collar workers. Again, foreign-born PhDs can't be the answer, or marketing nursing as a preferred career option for immigrant girls (which, sadly, is too common!) instead of, say, career in economics or IT.
We have been there several times before -- and have always found a solution that has propelled our country fast forward and to the top. For example, the post-war situation which saw an "excess" of both the new wartime female labour force and the 500,000 refugees in need of resettling and jobs to support themselves, coupled with the devasting fact of losing one-third of the country's industrial capacity and Europe's richest nickel deposit. Some 20,000 annual immigrants spread over a calendar year is hardly something we can't handle. We have an excellent support system already in place. It's obviously different in backward countries like the United States where they still can't or won't even take care of their own citizens.
