There are many things that one can do to retard or facilitate adaption of newcomers to Finland. One of the worst is constant suspicion by politicians who have no qualifications or understanding of migration. Good examples are National Coalition Party MP Pia Kauma who does not have the faintest idea about migrants but is still strolling with her baby carriage; members of the Perussuomalaiset* party who call certain migrants “harmful.”
The worst way to help adaption of newcomers to Finland is by treating them as unequal members of society and by using labels such as “person of migrant origin.”
If you want to speed up the process of adaption of newcomers to Finland and make them a part of our society, we must then really wish that and take down those structures that permit institutional racism to see another day. But how serious are we about turning newcomers into active members of society and how much ignorance and racism guide our attitudes? Unless we don’t understand this, all integration programs are doomed to failure.
How to describe Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP Veikko Vallin’s tweet below? Vallin, who likes to be called the Trump of Tampere, likes posing with MAGA caps and often makes racist remarks about asylum seekers, who are mostly Muslims. He even brags on social media about how he was able to escape taxes in Finland by moving to Estonia.
One does not have to look too far into Vallin’s social media history stained with racist posts.
The PS MP now tries to show is “anti-racism” side with the following tweet:
“@jemustakalio of the Greens speaks about “brown” people. It is an odd word. If anything, it differentiates [people]. For me, skin color does not mean anything. We are all people irrespective of our skin color.”
Source Twitter
Everyone can see how disingenuous Vallin’s tweet is. What about if we substituted the term skin color with “religion” or “Muslim?”
I doubt that he’d ever claim that we “are all people irrespective of our religion.”
The hard truth about Vallin’s tweet is that it is typical of people who believe Finland is only white and that there is only one kind of Finn. It is a convenient way to close one’s eyes to racism’s harm to people in Finland.
The only appropriate time people like Vallin accept “brown Finn” is when it labels such groups as criminals.
Vallin believes that racist statements will get him reelected.
This week we learned about how widespread women in the rescue department are victims of sexual harassment and discrimination, according to Yle. We also learned about the ministry of justice’s plans to tackle discrimination and hate-speech awareness with a 52-point program with the help of training increased support for organizations racism and hate crime.
Writes Yle News: “In the future all Finnish police departments will undergo training on non-discriminatory police work while municipal councillors will take courses on hate speech,” reports Helsingin Sanomat.
As parties like the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), Christian Democrats and Movement Now (Liike nyt), and especially the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* have encouraged and given a platform to racism and bigotry, in the same way, more have spoken out against discrimination.
There is an old saying that goes something like this: I was a liberal in youth so I would not be a fascist in old age.
What motivates a politician to twist and exaggerate facts to stigmatize migrants? National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) MP Heikki Vestman’s speech in parliament Wednesday is a prime example of how some politicians spread Islamophobia to attract attention and gain power.
His unsubstantiated talking points motivated me to write an email to him, which he has not yet responded to.
Moreover, the MP uses code to tell us what groups he is targetting. The term “asylum seeker” usually means Muslim.
“When I heard your speech and rationale Wednesday (20 October), I wondered how a young, apparently intelligent person could house such opinionated and unsubstantiated claims about migrants. If you are honest, would you want to [live and] grow up in a country where this type of discourse is ongoing by politicians seeking power and attention? Read some history and check out how the Finns were labeled in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s.
Does the phrase “en finne igen” ring a bell?
After North America, the greatest number of Finnish immigrants, or about half a million people, moved to Sweden. In the 1960s and 1970s, Finns had a terrible reputation in the neighboring country. Whenever a crime occurred, Swedes usually responded, “it must be a Finn,” en finne igen.
Here is a question to Vestman: Why are you picking and bullying vulnerable groups of people who cannot defend themselves from your attacks?
National Coalition Party anti-immigration MP Heikki Vestman. Source: Kokoomus
Below are some unsubstantiated claims (that I translated and paraphrased) from Vestman’s speech. He was against loosening family reunification guidelines because the minors, whom he sadly referred to as “anchor babies,” could become a national security threat.
Vestman should know that having a family is a human right.
Islamophobia and other forms of racism are for some politicians their gateway to power and infamy.
Watching part of the firey debate Wednesday in parliament that led to a vote of confidence for the government, one wonders what some politicians, especially with the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party, have in their heads.
The saddest matter was the bullying and false claims about migrants, nothing more than storms in teacups.
Those politicians and parties who only think beyond their noses are doomed to hitting a wall.
They are heading towards such a fate because they believe that Islamophobic and other racist soundbites will help them to have and retain power and influence.
After launching an aggressive campaign and burning up a lot of money in themunicipal elections of June, the PS came in fourth place despite some polls, which showed it to come out on top.
The result was a huge disappointment and the party gasped for air.
If there is a crack line in the PS, their disappointing result in the municipal election is an indication that the public is growing weary of their broken-record scapegoat-migrant approach.
It has been a bad week for Helsinki University with Helsingin Sanomat uncovering an alleged discrimination case by the faculty of theology. The incident comes after the university’s department of geography students dressed up like colonizers of a popular board game, Afrikan tähti (Star of Africa).
The Helsinki University geography department gave Tuesday a public apology concerning the incident.
Surprisingly, Jasmine Fantaa’s Instagram post, which was responsible for the incident of the geography students to go viral, was taken down and could not be accessed Wednesday.
The second discrimination case alleges that theology students of Islam with Finnish surnames were picked to teach at a school over students that did not have Finnish-sounding names.
Giving a Nazi salute at the notorious Dachau concentration camp not only shows tremendous ignorance but is a slap in the face to all the victims of Hitler’s racial policies. According to The Nomad Today, a Spanish ex-pat online newsletter, two Finnish tourists who visited the camp gave a Nazi salute.
Writes The Nomad Today: “The visitors from Finland, men aged 50 and 52 respectively, took photographs of each other at the camp near Munich…All three have been banned from the Dachau site for life, and the authorities are to press charges.”
The publication did not specify what charges were going to be brought against the two Finns.
The Dachau concentration camp opened in 1933 near Munich and was intended to hold political prisoners. Apart from forced labor, it eventually imprisoned Jews, Romani, Germans, and Austrians sentenced as criminals.
The camp was known for its treatment of its inmates that included ill-treatment, flogging, standing cells, and hangings.
James Baldwin (1924-87) is one of the greatest and most insightful writers, essayists, and activists of black USAmerica. With the help of his words, we are capable of seeing the beast that has oppressed and tormented the black.
James Baldwin
His Insights offer as well a glimpse at our monster.
There has been a lot of debate about what is Finnishness and who can claim it.
Writes Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in his biography of Baldwin (Begin Again) that “No matter what (US)America said about him as a black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man.”
One’s identity is a personal matter. Those that impose identity labels on you are using their power and privilege to exclude you.
“…the white man’s motive (to retain power and superiority) was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.”
The latter quote speaks volumes about the plight of second-generation Finns.
I got to know Amir* in 2016 when he was living in the Kolari asylum refugee center. Thanks to his help and those of others, the asylum seekers of the reception center organized a demonstration that ended with the deputy manager, Jari Sillantie, getting sacked.
Amir, an Iraqi, came to Finland in 2015 like so many of his countrymen.
He writes:
I’m sorry I didn’t send you a long time ago; I spent all these years in poor condition and full of stress.
I’m tired and have suffered a lot from 2015 to 2021; psychological pressure and my nerves tight. There is no such thing as mercy or humanity [here]. We have suffered a lot of stress and other things. We cried so much that we got sick to the point where we could never sleep normally again.
Asylum seekers demonstratingat the Kolari asylum reception center in May 2016.
We have been interviewed by the authorities several times and have received rejections on asylum for trivial reasons. The reason is that they don’t want to help us. If they wanted to, they would do so. Once in an interview, my wife threw herself on the floor and urinated on herself. There was no mercy or humanity despite what happened.
I have many problems in Iraq, and I even submitted papers to the authorities proving this. I was the reason why they killed two people who were with me. My friends accused me of being part of the group that killed my friends, but they were wrong. They still don’t believe me.
We had a lot of problems when I lived with my wife in Iraq. My wife’s brother got injured in a demonstration, and they burned down his house.
An asylum seeker demonstrating in Kolari in May 2016.
We started to go to a church in Finland for a while because they gave us some food and aid. My children liked going there, but something unexpected happened. One day, when we were returning from the church, another brother of my wife called. My son answered the phone, and a big problem emerged when my father-in-law, a Muslim, overheard the conversation that we had gone to church.
My father was a Christian, and I had many problems because of this in Iraq. When my father-in-law overheard us, he started to curse and curse until he began threatening us. He stated that he’d kill his daghter and me because I deceived his daughter to change religion. The threats did not stop. He started to spread them in Iraq, vowing to kills us.
All the suffering my wife has endured has caused her to commit suicide more than once. I have visited many psychiatrists and taken a lot of medicine. My wife, even my little son, went to see a psychiatrist.
We don’t have anyone here or in Iraq who would care for us. And on top of this, the police are now telling us to leave and go back to Iraq. They have threatened to cut off all financial aid, housing, everything. I asked them where we were supposed to go with three young children.
I have thought many times that I have wasted seven years of my life in Finland. I was given an ultimatum together with my wife’s children to go back to Iraq. They gave me 30 days to decide. Next week I’ll be expelled from the refugee center, and I don’t know what will happen to us after that.
*Amir is an assumed name used to protect his identity because he is an asylumseeker. The story was lightly edited.
Sexual assault, especially suspected cases, is heatedly used by anti-immigration parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* and public services like the police to demonstrate how some foreigners are. The police admitted today to a mistake in tabulating suspected sexual assault cases during 2020.
The mistake originates from a foreigner suspected of sexually assaulting his wife 141 times. Since the person was reported as 141 individual suspects, the amount for 2020 is therefore too high.
The police and Statistics Finland have confirmed the mistake.
The correct percentage of all suspected sexual assaults last year was 27.2%, not 38.5%.
Another interesting finding of the sexual assault statistics is that Northern Europeans, not Western Asians (Middle Easterners, Persians, and other nationalities), committed most suspected sexual assaults.
Why didn’t the media make a bigger deal about this fact?
Northern Europeans had the most sexual assault cases (58.9%), as many as 80% of alleged sexual assault against children.
Another important legal point that media coverage forgot to mention is that a person is innocent before proven guilty by a court of law. The number of convicted cases for sexual assault is only a fraction of the suspected ones. In 2019, 12.9% of all suspected cases were handed convictions.
