Taiwanese students' struggles to enter Finland

expensive and dangerous to get a study residence permit.

I’m writing this article to express our sincerest complains toward Finnish Bureaucracy. We are Taiwanese students who were admitted to Finnish universities in 2020 and postponed our study due to corona virus situation.

We didn’t have available Finnish service in Taiwan to process residence permit; furthermore, Taiwan is an island country and the nearest consult is located in Hong Kong, which means in order to acquire permit we have to fly to other country. It potentially takes at least 35 days for one round trip on top of additional cost of 2000 USD and risking our lives of exposing to pandemic situation.

We understand the difficulty for the Finnish government at first place. However, over the past one year, while other countries have been improving, Finland government remains unchanged and unwilling to improve in term of the visa system.

We simply couldn’t understand the logic behind it. The last processes are interview and collecting bio-info which will be delivered to Finland. How comes it can’t be done remotely? We have a Finnish trade office here. We knew that Finland bases its visa on equality, that means no one gets special treatment, but in this desperate time we just hope for some contingent measures. If this system remains the same, which we believe it will, it just undermines more Taiwanese students’ opportunity to integrate in Finland and drives them away from Finnish educational environment.

Please hear our voice out and change.

-- Please sign the petition: bit.ly/ReformMigri