Niko Pyrhönen, Karin Creutz and Marjukka Weide 8 Orchestrating National Unity: An Assessment of Discourses in Immigrant Legislation and the Surrounding Parliamentary and Public Debates 8.1 Introduction In this paper, we examine the articulations and perceptions of the state’s role in the management of immigration during the past decade in Finland. We look at recent developments in Finnish immigration legislation – with particular focus on the Aliens Act of 2004 – and in the surrounding debates in parliamentary and media arenas. With the focus on these debates, we seek to explicate in three separate sections how and to what effect the state’s role is being articulated alongside the endeavours to manage immigration. First, we consider the policy-level data in terms of the preparatory work in the ministries and in the parliamentary committees. This is done in order to identify some underlying national discourses that support the management of the perceivably immigration-induced, societal heterogenisation. Achieving this also entails identifying frames within which national belonging and unity are being discursively constructed vis-à-vis the immigrant Other.1 The section will also propose four frames through which national unity is discursively produced in the data considered in the subsequent sections. These frames will also be illustrated through some concrete examples from the preparatory process of the 2004 Aliens Act. By establishing this in the first section, this chapter outlines the nature and interconnectedness of the various impediments that the top-down articulations of national unity may present to the development of more decentralised and case-sensitive immigration regimes within a welfare state context. Secondly, we examine the empirical manifestations of the belonging frames within parliamentary speeches of the Finnish MPs, analyzing the 2003–2004 debates on the Aliens Act and a complementary text from the 2003 Integration Act debates. We track down themes and ways of talking which relate to the ones identified in 1 Othering is an important theoretical apparatus here. It defines the process through which an indi- vidual or collective is placed in the position of the Other (Eide 2008:156). Simultaneously, the notion of a shared collective is delineated through these social boundaries. Thus, othering is decisive when discussing the questions of belonging that are in the core of national unity (McIver 2003). © 2015 Niko Pyrhönen, Karin Creutz and Marjukka Weide This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.