I got an email from a Migrant Tales reader who told me about Avelino*, a middle-aged Filipino who was working in Finland but who got deported last year with his two children. He wasn’t the first undocumented migrant I had met in Finland. The first one I met was a Mexican cook in the 1980s who was working for a restaurant called Mexicana in Helsinki.
Avelino is a software engineer with 25 years experience in his field who worked for a Finnish company in Indonesia before moving to the country. He got a residence permit in 2011. His daughter and son, who were at the time 16 and 15 years old, respectively, moved to Finland later on.
The Filipino and his two children became undocumented migrant by overstaying their residence permits.
Avelino has worked in a number of countries like Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and in the Philippines during his long career.
The Filipino blamed his family’s deportation on the “migration crisis,” when many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans came to Finland in the fall and winter of 2015 and 2016. “If so many Muslims wouldn’t have come to Europe,” he explained, “I would have been able to stay in Finland.”
Avelino considered it unfair that he, who came to Finland legally, is forced to leave the country.
“They [asylum seekers] came here illegally [sic] and we moved here legally,” he said. “We paid taxes and they get everything [for free].”
He considered himself and his two teenage children to be “collateral damage” of the migration “crisis” that swept Europe from 2015.
“Humanity does not only apply to Muslims but to us as well,” he added.
On top of the difficulties of keeping himself financially afloat and simultaneously trying to find employment, the ultimate blow came when the Espoo police service made his family feel as if they were criminals when they were escorted to board the plane to the Philippines from the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.
Avelino in the end of 2016 in Helsinki just a few days before he was deported from Finland. Photo: Enrique Tessieri.
Avelino has suffered a number of setbacks in Finland and tried his hardest to stay in the country. The first one came in 2013, when he and his two children contracted tuberculosis.
“I lost my job and was one month in confinement and treated for seven months for tuberculosis,” he explained. “I was given social aid and allowed to stay in Finland with a residence permit on humanitarian grounds.”
Continue reading “Avelino* wasn’t the first undocumented migrant I had met in Finland”
