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Notes -
At least in Finland, the region with most emigration to US (Southern Ostrobothnia) is also stereotypically the most right-wing region in the country. Since Finnish immigrants to US were known to be often very left-wing (Finns were very strongly represented in CPUSA), one theory is that this right-wing status is partly caused by US emigration - the sort of people who would immigrate to Finnish cities from the countryside in other regions and join the labor movement instead moved to US in Southern Ostrobothnia, probably because the main city in Southern Ostrobothnia (Wasa) is Swedish-speaking and the countryside was more Finnish-speaking.
That’s very interesting and makes sense in the same vein as the Swedish emigration. There’s also this piece on how German participants in the 1848 revolutions fled after they were crushed, and thus made the German immigrant population in the US exceptionally liberal, and even played a disproportionate role in abolitionist movements. All of these are cases where the impact of immigration had the exact opposite effect of what we would assume by looking at native populations, since the immigrants were specifically people who left in part because they didn’t fit in.
You have anything you recommend to read on Finnish immigration?
I don't have any particular recommendations, since this is the sort of a topic where I've basically obtained a bunch of information by osmosis but haven't, say, read a comprehensive book on Finnish Americans.
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