Yesterday we told you that 7% of women born in Finland chose to marry a foreign man in 2018. A percentage that fell last year compared to 2017, when 7.5% of women in Finland preferred to marry men from other cultures.
In fact, except for some exceptional years, the share of international marriages involving women of Finnish background has been gradually increasing since the 1990s, when it was around 4%, according to Statistics Finland.
Source: Statistics Finland
The most wanted by Finnish women
With a year of delay, the statistical office of Finland also publishes the data of the most common nationalities at the time of marriage, either with men or with women born in Finland.
Regarding Finnish women, the favourites are no longer Latinos from southern Europe or Swedes or Germans, as it used to be decades ago. The result is that, in the last year for which data is available (2017), Iraqi men were, by far, preferred by Finnish women to get married.
Source: Statistics Finland.
Far behind the Iraqis, Turkish and stateless men (probably most of them asylum seekers without known citizenship) were the second and the third most wanted, ahead of North Americans, British, Russian and Swedish men.
If we talk about African men, Gambians and Moroccans were the main beneficiaries of international marriages with Finnish women, followed by Nigerians and Ghanaians.
The most wanted by Finnish men
The picture is slightly different when we look at the figures of the favourite foreign women of the Finnish men to get married. In this case it is the Russian neighbors who appear leading the ranking.The difference with the case of women is that there is a second nationality that steps on the heels of the Russians: Thai women.
Source: Statistics Finland
Behind the Russians and Thai come Filipino women, who are third in the ranking of marriages with Finnish men. Estonian and Chinese women are next.
Outside Europe and Asia, women from the United States and Brazil are the favourite of Finnish men to get married. In Africa, Morocco is once again the number one.
Against what many believe, official data show that Finnish men also marry women from Islamic countries. In addition to Morocco, Iraq, Turkey and Iran appear among the fifteen main nationalities.
