THIS STORY WAS UPDATED The European Parliament rejected Thursday a plan to step-up search and rescue operations for refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean with 290 votes narrowly defeated the motion against 288 in favor. Needing only three votes to pass, seven of the 13 Finnish MEPs didn’t even bother to vote (Ville Niinistö, Heidi…
Month: October 2019
Social Democracy for who?
Finland might be the least welcoming place for people of color Before writing this piece, I want to acknowledge my personal privileges that allow me to write such a critical essay. I am an Iranian-born artist holding a United States passport who is residing in Finland based on an international student residency. By no means,…
Chile se levantó de una larga pesadilla que empezó el 11 de setiempre de 1973
Soy tan viejo que me acuerdo perfectamente de la noticia del día 11 de septiembre de 1973, un martes, cuando las fuerzas armadas chilenas bombardearon el Palacio de la Moneda donde muere el presidente legítimo de los chilenos, Salvador Allende. Esta semana muchos se levantaron de una pesadilla larga que empezó hace 46 años, durante…
What Yle leaves out when it tells us why labor discrimination exists in Finland
THIS STORY WAS UPDATED If there is one matter that shines brightly from the editorial standards of Yle, it is its whiteness and how little regard they have for our people to voice the concerns of our ever-growing culturally diverse community. OK, true, there was a lot written this week about job discrimination and how…
Exposing Finnish white privilege #65: Racism exists because our society profits from it
What thoughts race in your head whenever a politician, public official, or white Finn rambles on about how social justice is a key value of our society and why racism and discrimination, which are illegal, have no place in Finland? While the latter is important for newcomers to know, the issue is how such topics…
MP Wille Rydman’s racist malarkey is a copy-and-paste job of the Perussuomalaiset
Wille Rydman is a National Coalition Party (NCP) MP who has built his career on xenophobia and racist soundbites. For some in the NCP, he is known as the Halla-aho of the party. Perussuomalaiset (PS) chairperson Jussi Halla-aho is largely responsible for steering the party further to the far-right. He was convicted of ethnic agitation…
Exposing Finnish white privilege #64: The cancer of institutional racism in Finland
THIS STORY WAS UPDATED There are many types of social ills that are cancerous, but the one I want to speak now is about institutional racism in Finland. Institutional racism is a racket, a criminal conspiracy, to exclude people by ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. Institutional racism is a racket that maintains a system that…
The Soldiers of Odin threaten to take over and defend by force the northern Finnish border checkpoint of Tornio
The head of the far-right Nazi-spirited vigilante group Soldiers of Odin, Mika Ranta, threatened in a statement to take over the Tornio border checkpoint and defend it by force if the Swedish authorities let in asylum seekers as in 2015. Center Party MP Mikko Kärnä states in the Center Party newspaper Suomenmaa that he has…
Study: If you have a “foreign”-sounding name, you will need more than luck to get work
THIS STORY WAS UPDATED A new study published by Akhlaq Ahmad about labor market discrimination in Finland and the results, while not pretty, reinforce what we’ve known all along: ethnic discrimination is commonplace in Finland’s labor markets. On Saturday, Migrant Tales published a news story that showed that the number of work permits granted to…
The high social and economic cost of xenophobia and doing very little about it
As Finland faces an ever-worsening labor shortage due to the greying of its population, the number of EU nationals that want to work in Finland has taken a nosedive, according to Seura. The number of EU nationals that were granted work permits in 2018 totaled 4,179, which is a 28.1% fall from 5,699 in 2015,…