Author: Migrant Tales

The language of “keeping Finland white”

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

The ongoing debate on the role of immigrants in Finnish society boils down to one big issue for the right-wing populists: How to keep Finland white and curtail non-European immigration.  The view, that Finland must remain white, is as racist as a white man’s claim in the United States during the Civil Rights era that blacks don’t have a place in society. 

The language that some parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) use to hit home their racist and exclusive message is cannier: “We are against multiculturalism and certain groups like Muslims are incompatible with our culture and way of life.” 

The real message behind that line of thinking is: “Finland must remain white.”

By “remaining white” they mean there is very little room for diversity in our culture.

Those who preach an ethnically homogeneous Finland that never existed will rarely tell you the fate they wish those who aren’t white in our society. Is our place in this society eternal exclusion confined by the walls of racism and prejudice?

Due to Finland’s minuscule foreign population and Finns’ little contact with immigrants in the past have created an opportune breeding ground for spreading urban myths and racism. Only after the horrific events that hit Norway and the world on July 22 are we now beginning to awaken to the potential of racism to inflict grave harm to our society and values.

We must understand that at least a part of the PS are a serious threat to Finland. If we allow their “keep-Finland-white” ideology to get the upper hand in this country, it will end up impoverishing us as a nation. The more we fail to incorporate all the parts of our society into the mainstream the more we will blame others – the further we will sink in that abyss of our failure.

Those Norwegian Labor Party representatives and common people who died at the hands of Anders Breivik would have certainly wanted us to speak out for them.

Their message comes in loud and clear: Don’t forsake us with your silence against those who are intolerant and spiteful of others.

Finland’s belated response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

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By Enrique Tessieri

Finland lags behind the rest of Europe in some areas. Good examples are immigration and reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Is the growth of right-wing populism in Finland today only a belated response to the demise of the former Soviet Union in 1991 and Berlin Wall?

I remember clearly when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev paid his first visit to Helsinki in autumn 1989. That historic visit, which I covered for the London Financial Times, was the first big step in the thawing of cold war relations between Helsinki and Moscow.

Even if over two decades have passed since Gorbachev’s visit to Finland, it is curious that Finland has not yet begun to debate in earnest its cold war era. This is understandable since those policy makers who were junior civil servants in cold war Finland  are today senior officials on the verge of retirement.

The cold war era took too long and was too big of an event to forget or conveniently brush under the rug. Some of the matters we should look at are how the media was censored and how politicians used Finnish-Soviet relations to strengthened their grip on power.

The lack of any meaningful debate on the cold war and that era in general could explain in great part the victory of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party in the April election. Was it a belated response to the end of the cold war?

Each European country is different and their responses to a post-Soviet Union era differs. In Finland, our initial response was to become an EU member in 1995 and to continue life in this corner pocket of Europe as normal as possible.

Finland’s past and present small immigrant population says as well a lot about the PS and today’s political situation. For one, it reveals that those that came out to celebrate the end of the cold war twenty-two years late are probably more anti-EU than anti-immigration. If this is the case, it shows why all right-wing anti-immigration populist parties in the Nordic region except for the PS have lost ground after Anders Breivik went on his mass-murder rampage in Norway on July 22.

If there is a silver lining in the PS’ election victory in April it is Finland’s slow but certain rejection of anti-immigration populism by the likes of PS MP Jussi Halla-aho and his cronies. Nobody knows for certain but it is pretty clear by the reaction of other political parties, the media and common people that we do not want to follow Denmark’s former example.

Why? Because immigration laws and attitudes have been pretty tight in Finland to begin with.

The present political situation has placed new challenges on the country’s traditional parties as well. The Center Party could be seen as the first casualty of the post-post cold war era.

It’s pretty clear that “Finland’s Spring” will get stronger in the months ahead as our economic standing weakens in the face of a financially ever-troubled Europe and anemic global markets. It would be a mistake to assume as well that the PS will be the only party to benefit from the situation.

A visible group like the PS with all of its populist rhetoric has fuelled the rise of other parties like the Greens, Left Alliance and Kokoomus.

People may flock to Kokoomus to offset the rise of the PS and others to the Greens and Left Alliance to challenge the rise of right-wing populism.

Are we all Finns?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

It is a nice idea when some people assure immigrants that “we are all Finns.” I am certain that the person who makes such a statement has the best intentions in mind. However, isn’t it our right to choose who we are on our terms?  Affirming that “we are all Finns” is as ludicrous as claiming “we are not Finns.” 

The more I encounter these types of views of how Finland’s newcomers should be accepted into Finnish society the more I believe some Finns still don’t get it.

Would it be better to state that we are all equal members of Finnish society?

One of the important matters that our Constitution and the spirit of our laws show us is the right of people to make their own lifestyle and identity choices.

I still believe what I wrote about two years ago about the importance of having such a choice: “What will our new identity be like in the present century as our society becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse? Will immigrants be clumped into one group and called New Finns, or will they prefer a hyphenated identity such as Iraqi-Finn?”

At the end of the day the only person who will decide what you are is yourself.

 

 

Don’t blame the foreign worker in Finland

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By Enrique Tessieri

One of the matters that continues to surprise me about the ongoing immigration debate in Finland are the so-called “bad” foreign laborers who purposefully come to this country to dodge taxes and work for slave-labor wages. Some claim that it is the foreign laborers’ fault while in fact opportunity to break the law is given by the employers.

Hiring foreign workers and paying them low wages happens everywhere. Without these types of workers how could the industry of countries like the United States or regions like the European Union maintain a competitive edge in global markets? The same practice has been going on in Finland and it appears that this type of illegal activity will get worse.

Action against the exploitation of illegal or semi-legal foreign laborers shouldn’t rest squarely on the worker entering our market but sparely on employers, unions and government watchdogs that should be doing their jobs.

I am certain that if foreign workers that enter the Finnish market were given the opportunity to make the same amount of money as natives and thereby make a decent living for them and their family, many would gladly pay taxes and contribute to the community.

Blaming foreign workers is only a pretext to look the other way at the real culprit: employers and those bodies that are supposed to regulate them.

HS.fi: Maahanmuuttajat eivät korostu Suomen henkirikostilastoissa

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Comment: Felonies committed by immigrants do not stand out in Finland even though crimes committed by such people are one of the favorite weapons used by far-right politicians in the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party to discredit foreigners.  A study published in Wednesday’s Helsingin Sanomat on homicides committed in Holland, Sweden and Finland show that the felony rate among immigrants in this country is relatively low when compared with Holland.

A typical felony in Finland is committed by a middle-aged person who has a serious alcohol problem. The victim is a person who has been drinking with him or her.

“In Finland only six percent of homicides are carried out by organized crime or other criminal activity,” said researcher Martti Lehti. “The corresponding figure for Holland was 30%, which surprised us.”

A couple of years before Finland’s first Alien’s Act came to force in 1983, a group of foreigners and I handed a petition to some MPs in parliament. The police chief was present as well. When I asked why Finland was so uptight about immigrants, the police chief said that they wanted to keep crime levels down. 

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EU-maiden välillä on erittäin suuria eroja henkirikosten syissä ja tekotavoissa. Suomessa tyypillisen henkirikoksen tekijä on keski-ikäinen alkoholin suurkuluttaja ja uhri humalainen ikätoveri. Ruotsin tilanne myötäilee Suomea, mutta Hollanti on jo toista maata.

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Finnish far-right thinking for dummies: The Wave

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By Enrique Tessieri

This true movie below took place in 1967 Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California. The experiment shows how easy it was to convert the class of high school students to become far-right followers that supported the Nazi régime in Germany during 1933-45. What would happen to our country if we embraced the ideology of associations like Suomen Sisu,  Suomalaisuuden Liitto or allowed the worldview of far-right politicians like Jussi Halla-aho, James Hirvisaari to be taught at our schools?

The answer to that question is the movie The Wave.

Below is a trailer of the newer version of the original movie.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbTkdqYivuw&feature=player_embedded#!]

There are already a number of Cubberley High Schools in Finland that are not classroom experiments. Check out Hommaforum and Scripta, where they call their absolute leader, Halla-aho,  “The Champion.”

Our ability to deny the atrocities of present and past generations is a quality that permits us to commit the same outlandish crimes again.

The teacher, Ron Jones, who carried out the experiment told the students at the end of the movie: “You thought you were so special better than everyone else outside this room. You traded your personal freedom for the luxury of feeling superior. You accepted the group’s will over your own convictions no matter who you hurt. You just thought you were going along for the ride and could walk away at any moment. But where were you heading? How far would you have gone?”

He continues: “But if the (Wave) experiment is successful, we’d learn that we are all responsible for our actions and you must question what you do rather than blindly follow a leader. And for the rest of your lives you will never allow a group’s will to usurp your individual rights. (The Wave) is a lesson we’ll share for the rest of our lives.”

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6295516544338309782]

Special thanks go to Hans Zwaga for bringing this movie to my attention.

Extremism in Finland and elsewhere grows on the same soil of hatred

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By Enrique Tessieri

The video clip blow is a frightening example of how far-right groups like the Nazi Party of the United States use the First Amendment (freedom of speech) to justify their hate speech. While it’s unlikely that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party or even Muutos 2011 and Vapauspuolue will have summer camps with Nazi flags and members dressed in SS-like gear, they do believe in racial purity and loathe Muslims.

Even if these parties may not go to such extremes as the American Nazi Party to drive home their message, there is always a probability it may lead to that if the time is right. If we listen to PS MPs like James Hirvisaari or Juho Eerola and read what Jussi Halla-aho has written about Muslims, a big question mark emerges.

It would be naive and foolish to brush aside these Suomen Sisu members as an innocent group. Even if they do not carry Nazi flags their thoughts and visions of Finland are in the same ball park as some white supremest groups in the United States and Europe. People express themselves different culturally even though they believe in the same ideological goals.

Suomen Sisu, of which Halla-aho and his cronies are members of the far-right association, recommend reading Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi war criminal hanged in Nuremberg, and are against Finns marrying foreigners.

Susan Canedy, author, America’s Nazis says in the video clip tells us what Nazi Germany promised its people: “Adolf Hitler when he went to jail and wrote Mein Kampf  wrote what he knew: anti-Semitism was rampant and rife in Germany. What Hitler was able to do was capitalize on that unhappiness and throw some bones. Will you accept anti-Semitism if I give you a job? If I give you a uniform? If I give you a way of life? If I give you something to hang on to, something to bring our children up in and make you feel proud and make you enjoy your life in your community would you do that? Seventy million people did that.”

The video clip may be offensive to some. Migrant Tales recommends viewer discretion.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hViE_lZ7rzg&feature=related]

The face of fascism has changed but the policies of such a political system are still out there. Today’s fascists, which  could be called Counter-Jihadists, despise Muslims as much as the Nazis hated the Jews.

It’s the same ogre with different clothing.

Weekend FT (January 1991): The last wall in Europe

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By Enrique Tessieri

Of all the features I wrote for the Financial Times as Helsinki correspondent (1989-91), I am particularly proud of one that I co-authored with Christian Tyler.  The last wall in Europe, which was published on January 26-27, 1991, was a long feature that attempted to shed light on Europe’s last wall, the Finnish-Soviet border, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

It seems odd, even strange, that a country like Finland that has had a sweet-and-sour relationship with its formidable neighbor Russia has yet to study with no strings attached what happened during the cold war era (1945-1991).

Elina Sana published in 2003 a book on the refugees, ethnic Finns, and Jews that were either sent to the Soviet Union or handed to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.

In March 2000, Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen offered an official apology on Finland’s behalf to eight Jews that were deported to Nazi Germany in 1942. Some rightfully claimed that Lipponen should have included in his apology 56,500 mostly ethnic Finns (Ingrians) and Estonians that were returned to the USSR after the Continuation War (1941-44).

It is a positive matter that Finns are beginning to debate this murky period.  Last month, YLE showed an interesting documentary called Loikkari on the plight of an Estonian captain called Herman Trial, who died in Finland in 1951. The video clip below is a trailer of a movie filmed in Finland in 1963 about the Estonian captain’s short-lived escape.

The cold war era could provide an answer to why some Finns see immigrants and refugees as a threat. How can we have empathy for asylum-seekers if we returned such people to the Soviet Union and had no regard for their human rights?

Finland can learn a lot about itself if it opens the closed doors of its cold war past.

Distinguished former diplomat Max Jakobson sums Finland’s policy towards refugees in the cold war. “The period of stagnation (cold war era) was not bad for Finland,” he was quoted as saying in the Weekend FT issue. “There is nothing wrong with stagnation if you can do it on a high-income level as we did. Our obligation is to look after our own interests.”

Migrant Tales has written on Soviet asylum-seekers in Finland in the past and how they were returned to the USSR to suffer a gruesome fate in psychiatric wards and prisons. One of these is Aleksandr Shatravka, who visited my home last month with his wife Irina.  Thanks to Aleksandr, whom I met on Migrant Tales, I published in February 2010 one of Finland’s first-ever extensive human- interest stories on a former asylum-seeker who was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union in 1976.

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought big challenges to Finland. At the time, there were anti-immigration populists like Keijo Korhonen who were capitalizing politically on the situation by claiming that we’d be soon overrun by Russians.

“There are 9m (million) frightened Soviet citizens living around Finland’s borders. The collapse of the Soviet system, the winter food shortages, and the shooting matches in the dissident Baltic republics have made the naturally xenophobic Finns more nervous of the Russians than ever,” we wrote in the Weekend FT.

We end the feature by stating “unless the Soviet Union is dragged back into its communist past, the last wall in Europe seems certain to crumble.”

Has Europe’s then last wall crumbled and has anything significant changed in the past twenty years?

Our ignorance of others and our ability to change

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Sometimes when hearing the arguments of some Finns and Europeans on immigrants, minorities and immigration is like returning to the nineteenth and/or part of the twentieth century. Our educational system has failed miserably if in 2011 people still believe cultures have certain predictable traits or that our genes guide our behavior like robots.

 We’d probably end up with the following conclusion if we studied the hate speech and arguments made by anti-immigration groups and then compared them with what people said over a hundred years ago: Different enemies and players, same reasoning.

The racism, xenophobia and prejudice we hear today is nothing more than the plagiarized arguments used in the past.

A good example is a claim by populist groups in Finland and elsewhere that Islam is the biggest threat to Europe. If we turned the hands of time back about 70 years, the same claims were made about the Roma, Communists, and Jews, who were seen as a threat to society.

Even if some Finns, who should know better like Aalto University senior lecturer Kyösti Tarvainen, believe that all one needs is a pocket calculator to see the Muslim threat, the future rarely reveals itself in such a simple fashion.

Similar predictions were made about the Jews in Finland in the 1880s about their high birth rates. Today, however, Finland’s Jewish population totals about 2,000. That is a far cry from “the millions” that were supposed to take over this country.

One of the biggest flaws that anti-immigration groups make about other ethnicities is a claim that such groups are incompatible with our society’s values. Even if they don’t use a pocket calculator, they employ their ignorance and prejudice to conclude that “other” people (not us) are controlled like robots by culture and never change. Any elementary social science student can prove this claim false.  Cultures and people change constantly.

If these cultures that are constantly ostracized by populist Europeans groups like the Perussuomalaiset party of Finland never changed,they would provide them a service. Since they cannot change they would in time die off. If such groups vanished because they were maladapted it would likewise spell then end of  the popularity of anti-immigration political parties, which base their support on hate rhetoric.

Even if  the same arguments are still out there being fed by a more modern version of our ignorance than over a century ago, it seems incredible that in the age of the Internet and modern technology we still seek refuge in our petty views and stereotypes of others.

If I could draw a cartoon of modern man and women and our relationship with other cultures, I’d picture it with the missing link ancestor sitting in front of a laptop speaking on his iPhone. The primate ancestor may have evolved in tool usage but is still in the “stone age” when it comes to understanding the world never mind how to interact with other cultures.

Ramapathicus was a more evolved primate than our missing link ancestor. It existed 8.5-12.5 million years ago. Source:  Leccos Ramapathicus.

That is why when we speak of racism, xenophobia and discrimination we have to ask a simple question: Why are these matters a threat to our society?

Answer: Because they are based on plagiarism and ignorance but, like all humans, we have the ability to learn and change.

YLE: Yritykset mainostavat työntekijöidensä suomalaisuudella

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Comment:  Is this how equal opportunities never mind social equality is supposed to work in Finland? The Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) claims in a story below that a number of small cleaning companies in Finland advertise that they only use Finnish employees.

Husein Mohammed of the Ombudsman for Minorities believes that this type of advertising may be illegal since it discourages employers from hiring immigrants.  

At least for an immigrant, such a claim by a company is a clear message to non-Finns: Don’t even waste your time asking for a job here.

The European Union as well as in Finland make it very clear in the laws that this type of discrimination is illegal. In the United States they call it intentional discrimination. 

“If they (cleaning companies) keep their promise (that all of their employees are Finns) then they are guilty of discrimination, which is illegal,” said Muhammed.  

The Ombudsman for Minorities official does not directly blame employers but clients who demand that Finns to do the job as opposed to immigrants. 

Last month in the city of Salo a black odd-job man  was laid off because of his ethnic background.  He was rehired after the case received wide coverage in the Finnish media.

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Useat pienet palvelualan yritykset mainostavat itseään sillä, että heidän kaikki työntekijänsä ovat suomalaisia. Vähemmistövaltuutetun toimistossa suomalaisia työntekijöitä korostavaa mainontaa pidetään arveluttavana. Jos markkinointi vaikuttaa työntekijöiden valitsemiseen, se voi olla myös laitonta.

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