Has anyone asked what the election in 2011 of 39 MPs of the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS) party has done to poison the political atmosphere for immigrants and visible minorities in Finland? To show how much in denial we still are in a country, take a closer look at some former and present PS MPs. Where’s…
Month: January 2014
Finland’s ombudsman for minorities says Helsinki social services and health care employees practice ethnic profiling
Finland’s ombudsman for minorities, Eva Biaudet, accused the Helsinki department of social services and health care of ethnic profiling because it requires its employees to check if “a foreign-looking” person has a residence permit, reports Helsingin Sanomat. The city of Helsinki said in a statement in June that its social services and health care employees…
Does intolerance fuel racist harassment and abuse?
We’ve written quite a few stories about racist bullying and the rise of an anti-immigration party, the Perussuomalaiset (PS), after the April 2011 elections. The Independent reports that the number of children seeking help in England for racist bullying “increased sharply” in 2013. One of the reasons for the sharp rise in children seeking help for…
Somali Finn Abdulah: Living in a land between Nowhere and Somewhere
Abdulah, whose life as a Somali Finn has appeared in previous stories on Migrant Tales, was especially troubled by a news story published this month about the sharp rise in deportations of convicted and undocumented immigrants. According to YLE, the number of deportations from Finland have risen sharply after the Sello Mall killings of December…
Finland is a highly racialized country
Racialization, or ethnicization, is a sociological concept that ascribes racial or ethnic identities to a relationship. In simple terms it is the way that a dominant group ascribes an identity on minorities in order to dominate them. In Finland this is so common that our nationality is mentioned on our drivers license even if we’re…
Finland’s distorted immigration debate is damaging our country
My son asked me Friday an interesting question that revealed what is wrong concerning the present debate on immigration and immigrants in Finland. He asked me to show how does immigration fuel economic growth. His question, which is a valid one, reveals some of the perceptions that some have about immigration. Due to the attention…
When will people with “immigrant backgrounds” be accepted as Finns on their terms?
After following on a daily basis news about cultural diversity in Finland and elsewhere, the stories that Migrant Tales aims to cover in 2014 are those stories that the mainstream media doesn’t consider news. One reason why the mainstream media still writes about cultural diversity from it’s perspective is because those writing the stories are mainly…