International Social Work

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The ethnic neighbourhood: A locus of empowerment for elderly

immigrants
Kathleen Valtonen
International Social Work 2002; 45; 315
The online version of this article can be found at:
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International Social Work 45(3): 315323

Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
0020-8728[200207]45:3;315323; 024358

i s w
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The ethnic neighbourhood

A locus of empowerment for elderly immigrants

Kathleen Valtonen

The welfare of the elderly population is both a contemporary and a

future concern faced by all branches of social service provision and
the caring professions. Within this wide spectrum of issues, this
article focuses on elderly Vietnamese immigrants in Finland who
have arrived and are resettling in the later years of their life. They
are part of rst-generation refugee cohorts, but have invariably
come under the family reunication programme, often in their late
50s and 60s.
From the perspective of social integration and participation, this
article proposes the ethnic neighbourhood as a spatial eld of
empowerment for this group, using the example of the Varissuo
area in the environs of the city of Turku in southwest Finland.
The Varissuo community was studied in two previous research
projects on immigrant integration (Valtonen, 1997, 1999).
Immigrant integration is understood as a process of becoming
part of the receiving society, through increasing participation in
different arenas of activity. Participation can be seen as engagement
with the formal and informal institutions of the surrounding society,
the outcome of which is a functioning network of relationships, ties
and roots in the new home society.
Participation opportunities and arenas of older persons differ
from those of younger groups. For persons who resettle in their
later years it has often been impossible to obtain employment or
re-establish ties to the labour market. Even though they arrive
Kathleen Valtonen is at the Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of the
West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. [email: KValtonen@fss.uwi.tt]

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International Social Work volume 45(3)

before retirement age, their resettlement takes place through engagement in other areas. Integration has to be facilitated through participation in other areas, such as the social and civil society arenas.
Social interaction takes place at a formal and informal level.
Resettling individuals have a wide range of contacts with ofcials
in the context of realizing their welfare citizenship and welfare
rights. In Finland, immigrants interface heavily with the publicservice sector which at present holds a sweeping mandate for
resettlement service provision.
The current social policy discourse, in Finland as in several other
welfare states, proposes the wider involvement of organizations,
community and family in welfare generation, as one promising
direction for future development in the eld. This represents, on
the one hand, an initiative to recognize more widely and utilize the
potential and complementary resources in the third sector. On the
other hand, such development is feared to facilitate state disinvestment in the public sector and its exit from responsibility in key
welfare areas (Shields and Evans, 1998). In welfare states, the implications of reappraising welfare responsibility areas and degrees of
involvement of different parties are considerable, and require careful
examination before changing policy.
Assessing the role of caring actors situated outside the formal
welfare system and legitimating their involvement in this arena
would constitute a positive dimension to the available welfare services of the older immigrant group under study here. The threshold
to using existing services is high because of language and cultural
differences. Not only do family and close circles constitute an informal base of caring that is hard to replace, but also their function as
mediators between the public sector, the wider society and their
elderly relatives is pivotal to the participation processes of the
latter. Close circles and networks can be understood as prime instruments facilitating the resettlement and integration of the elderly.
The societal background
Elderly immigrants still comprise a small percentage of the total
immigrant population in Finland. The main new ethnic communities, of which they are a part, have originated in Vietnam, Somalia,
Iraq, Iran and Former Yugoslavia. These groups arrived in the late
1980s and during the 1990s, as humanitarian immigrants, or refugees, under the national refugee resettlement programme. Another
newly settling group of elderly in Finland are returning ethnic
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317

migrants of Finnish ancestry, who, since the early 1990s, have been
in-migrating from areas of the Former Soviet Union. The question
of the wellbeing and welfare of elderly immigrants1 is a timely
one, as they now constitute a distinct constituency not only among
service users, but also among the `newer citizens'.
The situation of elderly immigrants has some features in common
with that of the Finnish elderly. Similar to their counterparts in the
general population, elderly immigrants increasingly live in households separate from their adult children.2 Although among the
majority population, old people prefer to be independent from
their children, in the case of immigrant elderly, one of the main
reasons for their shift away from extended-family or three-generation
arrangements is the public-housing policy which caters for the
nuclear family. Many of the elderly immigrants have not been
averse to living in their own households. At this point in time,
most of them still belong to the `young' old, approximately 5575
years of age, who are relatively healthy and vigorous (Foner,
1984). A central concern of theirs is to be able to maintain close
contact with their children and with others in their closer circles.
Ofcials have taken into consideration the requests for geographical
proximity, when it has been possible. More frequently, it is left to the
elderly and their kin to manage the logistics of maintaining close
contact. This has been done in stages and in various ways, using
public transport, the purchase of used cars to ease transportation
and eventually by gravitating spontaneously to a common residential area, Varissuo.
Varissuo is a residential settlement of 10,000, located 5 km from
the center of Turku city. The area is intensively built, with a welldeveloped service centre that comprises shopping, social and health
services. There are three schools, day-care centres, a library and a
variety of recreational facilities, as well as good public transport
connections. Because of the density of public housing in the area,
the proportion of resettling immigrants is relatively high, at 11.5 percent, compared with their 2 percent representation in the whole
population.
The Vietnamese community has become established in Varissuo,
which has been a destination also for a gradual ow of secondary
migration from other parts of Turku and other areas in Finland.
At present 45 families reside there. The Vietnamese and other
immigrant groups in Varissuo give a cosmopolitan avour to the
atmosphere around the service complex. Varissuo is an ethnic

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International Social Work volume 45(3)

neighbourhood characterized by a noticeable, though not yet high,

degree of ethnic concentration.
A variety of reasons have been given for secondary migration.
Some persons have moved for reasons of religion, as it is preferable
to live nearer to their congregation. Others came because of the
availability and price of public and private housing, the perceived
greater employment opportunities or the access to services in the
area.
The ethnic concentration
Many of the ills of what is perceived as failed immigrant integration
are attributed to poor spatial and housing arrangements. Residential
concentrations of immigrant communities have been seen in urban
studies literature as manifestations of societal malady or the spatial
result of marginalization. On the other hand, the advantages and
positive aspects of ethnic clustering have been largely ignored in
research (Dunn, 1998).
Young (1999) suggests that residential separateness may be an
expression of `differentiated citizenship' in which people are perhaps
exercising their right to be `together-in-difference', and that for
marginalized families, segregation may be a signicant source as a
network of family and friends. Rocco (1999) argues that concentrated settlement can prepare the conditions for articulating and
claiming various citizenship rights. The everyday sites and spaces
that are generally thought of as apolitical, such as courtyards,
bars and market stalls, can become political spaces in which communities articulate associational rights. These scholars attribute to
concentrated settlement the potential for synergy, which can be
transformed into collective strengths in the informal or formal
interest arena.
With regard to social and welfare rights, Dunn (1998) cites the
example of Cabramatta in Australia, where the critical mass of Indochinese residents who require similar services has brought to the
attention of authorities the need for ethnic-specic and bilingual
services. The level of demand from an ethnically concentrated constituency has made it feasible to provide more culturally appropriate
service components which would not have been possible for a more
spatially dispersed client group. Dunn (1998) has found that bilingual service provision has reduced the social isolation that would
have been experienced by many elderly Indochinese and others
not engaged in formal employment. `Concentration also means
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319

that non-English speaking Vietnamese are not isolated, or stuck in

their homes as they would be if they were in other areas' (Dunn,
1998: 519). In Varissuo, no services are available yet on a bilingual
basis. The advantage of the ethnic concentration is nonetheless
signicant because of the ready availability of informal interpreting
assistance. When necessary, interpreting assistance can be found or
arranged even at short notice.
The new legislation on immigration and integration in Finland
makes the point that resettling individuals and groups have the
right to retain their culture and cultural identity, and that this
principle is not in conict with the pursuit of full participation and
social citizenship. When social policy formally adopts the principle
of ethnocultural pluralism, it follows that the society should develop
support systems which cater to both the majority and minority needs
(Dawes, 1998).
The elderly are a group whose specic culture-based needs can be
more readily accepted, in comparison with younger resettling groups
who are supposed to have the advantage of a longer time span for
adjustment to the majority culture. The culture-based needs of
different resettling groups are often recognized, but in practice, are
not responded to or met directly. Reasons for this are complex,
but a prime consideration is one of cost benet, as for example,
when the user base is widely dispersed. This problem occurs in the
case of mother-tongue teaching arrangements for pre-school and
school-aged children. Instruction cannot be carried out efciently
when resources of time and personnel are spread thinly over a
wide geographic area.
Kin and personal communities
Most older people have kinship networks. They are almost always in
some sense part of a family with kin-related or social support networks. Service interventions should be considered within the context
of the elderly persons' kin and `personal communities' of friends
(Frogatt, 1990). Findings of recent follow-up research at Keele
University (Economic and Social Research Council, 1998) in the
UK on the family and community life of older people, show that
while the immediate family continues to play a central role in providing support, locally available friendship circles were found to constitute important complementary or alternative sources of help for the
elderly. These ndings are corroborated in the present case of the
Vietnamese elderly, who clearly retain their tradition of collective
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International Social Work volume 45(3)

culture that extends to close social circles as well as the extended

family. A high degree of social interaction and interdependence is
a feature of interpersonal relations in close social circles.
The interaction patterns among the elderly and in the ethnic community in Varissuo fall into the category of close or strong ties. The
strength of a tie, according to Granovetter (1973), is a combination
of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual
conding) and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie. This
does not mean that their close ties envelop the entire community. On
the contrary, similar to other resettling populations, the community
is very heterogeneous and lacks overall cohesion (Valtonen, 1994).
Close ties occur in the context of smaller selected social circles.
Spatial proximity in residential arrangements does away with the
otherwise overriding and restricting problem of transportation in
the case of the elderly. They are physically located in their kin and
personal communities of friends. This permits social circles and
social interaction patterns and dynamics to develop along many
dimensions and in many contexts.
The elderly may not directly participate in formally organized
activity, but are not cut off from the life of the community. The
Varissuo area is home to a mother-tongue club for school-aged children, that meets once a week and is well attended. Sports and outdoor activities for adults have gained popularity. There is also
participation in shared neighbourhood events. Everyday encounter
with the wider community takes place on `local turf ', and through
the linkage of those engaged in employment, school and study
activity. Mutual assistance mechanisms of the whole spectrum
develop in a community that has been accustomed to creating its
own social safety net in informal familial and closer social circles
in its society of origin.
Individuals' social contacts can be facilitated through their own
initiative, by the fact that they are located and accessible in the
neighbourhood, and through the many spontaneous occasions for
meeting in the course of daily activities in the local environs.
There is opportunity for the elderly individual to control independently the density and the scheduling of contact.
Data from the Eurobarometer survey (Walker and Maltby, 1997)
has shown that in spite of high levels of social contact feelings of
loneliness are present in a signicant minority of older people. But
Schultz (1976) has provided experimental evidence of the relationship between control and feelings of loneliness among the elderly.

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321

Residents of a retirement home were visited by college students

for a two-month period. In half of the cases, residents could
decide on the frequency and duration of these visits. In the other
half, the seniors did not have this control. Despite the fact that the
total contact was the same in both conditions, seniors who could
decide on the contacts reported themselves as experiencing less loneliness. The importance of control is also borne out in Perlman's
study (1988), in which loneliness was greater among respondents
who had moved to their present residence because of circumstances
rather than choice.
The concept of control is linked to that of self-determination and
agency. Immigrants who are resettling as elderly persons are not
generally catered for in the main resettlement programmes that
usually have a thrust towards participation in the labour market,
educational activity (including language instruction), and other
mainstream and formal societal institutions. The integration process
of elderly immigrants is easily neglected, as they are thought to be
past the crucial life periods when work and parenting present considerable demands, tasks and adjustment problems. Nonetheless,
the active participation of the elderly in the surrounding society is
the basis of their integration, even though their participatory forms
and fora differ from those of working-age immigrants. In the case of
elderly immigrants also, social policies can promote integration or
exclusion and isolation.
In studies of the European Observatory on Ageing and Older
People, the social integration of older people has been investigated
along three main dimensions: informal/family and friendship networks; quasi-formal, volunteering activity; and formal economic
and political institutions (Walker and Maltby, 1997). The two rst
dimensions would have relevance to the case of the Vietnamese
elderly in Varissuo. They have available, robust informal networks.
With respect to quasi-formal, volunteering activity, the ethnic neighbourhood allows for the spectrum of helping relations. Relations
can be based on balanced reciprocity, a more equitable form of
reciprocity, which is very common in close circles with a background
of collective (as opposed to individualist) culture. Those elderly
persons who are less able to reciprocate, because of health and
other reasons, are assisted by their personal communities and kin.
Moreover, the basis for intergenerational caring in both kin and
personal communities constitutes informal voluntary activity that
is complementary to formal service provision in the area.

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Multiplex relations
The living arrangements in the ethnic neighbourhood described
above demonstrate many of the advantages of residential proximity
for elderly immigrants. Vital features of the ethnic concentration are
the option of an adequate and desired level of social interaction, and
multiple fora and types of interaction. Within stable social circles,
there are diverse patterns of interaction giving rise to so-called multiplex relations. The quality of multiplexity, or multiple contents in a
relationship, are associated with strong ties (Kapferer, 1969: 213).
People are interfacing in many different roles and capacities.
Relationships are rich.
I propose that the quality of multiplexity in relations strengthens
in a special way the bonds between the elderly immigrants and their
social circles, and can be a decisive factor in reducing the risk of
loneliness in this group. Multiplex relations generate links which
are less likely to emerge from relationships with less dense and
more specic content. Diverse but intermeshing social linkage is
an important source of security for those persons facing resettlement
in the later stages of their life. The ethnic concentration facilitates
this integration mechanism in an exemplary fashion.
Concluding remarks
In this article a case has been presented for ethnic concentration and
the ethnic neighbourhood as a locus of empowering mechanisms for
the elderly in resettling groups. The spontaneous mechanisms of
assistance which can be found in ethnic neighbourhoods should be
recognized and integrated into the existing social service and social
work arena. Culturally appropriate community development
approaches are called for, as well as ongoing engagement with and
support of informal circles which are already providing caring for
the elderly. Outreach to the communities would ideally be implemented in collaboration with their members, and also through shaping equitable working partnerships.
Notes
1 I use the term `immigrant' when the issues refer to both `regular' immigrants and
`humanitarian' immigrants.
2 In the Scandinavian countries, 520 percent of the elderly lived with their children
at the end of the 1980s. The proportion was lowest in Denmark and Sweden, highest
in Iceland, while Finland and Norway were in between (Jakobsson, 1998).

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