Category: The Supermen

Deportation of Iraqi family of nine from Finland: Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s asylum policy is a shame to all of us

Posted on by Migrant Tales

As the Finnish government spends the Easter holidays in the comfort of their homes and family company, an Iraqi family of nine is awaiting deportation from Finland. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to put oneself in their shoes and wonder what is going through their heads at this moment at the Joutseno immigration removal center. 

The Finnish government of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, which shares power with the National Coalition Party and anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, is firmly behind these deportations which will start to pick up this year.

“Now is the season for deportations,” said a person who spoke on condition of anonymity and who works with asylum seekers. “It’s going to be a messy job [as the deportation of the Iraqi family shows].”

Deportations don’t work and they are an ineffective way of solving a problem. If being deported can be traumatic process for an adult, it must be even worse for children.

What is the most outrageous matter about the deportation of the Iraqi family and Finland’s asylum policy is that it is political. The PS, which saw their support plummet to the one-digit political league in the municipal elections, are desperately ratcheting up their anti-immigration and deport-them-all all rhetoric to attract voters.

Just like the PS, the NCP and Center Party aren’t any better but accomplices in the deportations.

One of the children of the family of nine looks outside her barred and barb-wired window. Source: Iltalehti.

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Asylum seekers: Finland is not a country that abides by the rule of law

Posted on by Migrant Tales
What does a comment by a police service official say about our country if he obstructs an asylum seekers’ right to justice? Migrant Tales understands that an Iraqi family, made up of a husband, wife, mother-in-law and a child, was told the following by a police official after receiving their first rejection for asylum from the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri).
 
“Don’t appeal the decision [to the district court] because you’re going to get a negative decision anyway,” the police official is said to have told the family.
 
What does the answer from the police official reveal about his knowledge of our legal system and who has access to it? 
 
Children demonstrating in May at the Kolari asylum reception center that led to the sacking of the deputy manager.

The police official’s answer to the family reveals, in our opinion, not only contempt for the asylum seekers but for our laws and institutions.

If we have police officials that advise and give legal counsel to asylum seekers as if they had a crystal ball, it’s clear that we’re in trouble. We are in a predicament because for the police official to give such advice it means that their is widespread complicity.

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Finnish immigration policy: Passing the buck and “yalla, yalla” police

Posted on by Migrant Tales

“Yalla, yalla”  is a rude way of ordering people around like the English term “gofer,” or go for this or go for that. “Yalla, yalla” was one of the first words that the Finnish staff at asylum reception centers learned to use to order refugees to move along. 

The conversation between a policeman and Iraqi asylum seeker who was presumably deported Thursday, revealed in crude fashion how the government of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä in general and Interior Minister Paula Risikko in particular pass the buck when it comes to putting people in harm’s way.

Since they don’t want to take any responsibility for the lives and fate of asylum seekers in Finland never mind their home countries, they too use the expression yalla, yalla when talking about immigration and asylum policy.

The asylum seeker on the recording is none other than “MS” who started to act unruly when he boarded a plane that was going to deport him on January 24 from Oulu in northern Finland. The captain said he would not take the asylum seeker on the flight.

After that incident, MS was taken to the Metsälä immigration removal center in Helsinki. The police officer, who sounds friendlier than the Arab-speaking woman interpreter, offers MS “400-500 euros” on his return to Baghdad if he doesn’t create a scene like the last time.

 The pictures above were taken on January 24 by the asylum seeker.

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Day 11 of the Helsinki demonstration by Iraqi asylum seekers: “The solution is asylum in Finland”

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Xassan Kaafi Maxamed Xalane is a Somali National Television journalist living in Finland who visited Iraqis at the Helsinki Railway Square where they’ve been demonstrating for 11 days. He was kind enough to allow Migrant Tales to publish an interview with one of the demonstrators.

We consider the demonstration to be very important. These asylum seekers, who have had to face the brunt of the government’s total disregard for their safety and their human right to seek shelter, are fighting for their lives by demonstrating peacefully and democratically.

Nour M. Jamal said yesterday that they are willing to demonstrate in Helsinki for as long as is necessary.

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The demonstration against deportation and tough asylum policies must continue

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Over a hundred people have joined a peaceful demonstration that began a week ago on Friday and which shows no sign of letting up was moved from near the Little Parliament to the Helsinki Railway Square. 

Despite a far-right group called Suomi Ensin (Finland First), which has tried to insult and ruin the demonstration with their presence, everything has been going well, according to Tiia Nohynek, who is taking part in the demonstration and said that there were about 100 people in the early evening.

“The atmosphere is really warm and Finns that pass by have shown their support by offering blankets and battery chargers,” she said. “The [far right] Suomi Ensi people are pretty faraway [about 500 meters] from us now. They have tried to disrupt our demonstration today but the police has stopped them.”

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Posted on by Migrant Tales

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A Finnish asylum policy that is doomed to fail

Posted on by Migrant Tales

It’s been well over a year since tens of thousands of asylum seekers came to Finland from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and others. An important watershed in the history of these asylum seekers took place in May, when an assessment by the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) saw parts of countries like Iraq are safe to return asylum seekers.

The decision by Migri in May very much defined the government’s asylum policy on what it would do to the majority of refugees that came to Finland. The new policy would tighten immigration policy and pass laws in parliament that would make family reunification near-impossible and undermine asylum seekers’ due process by, for example shortening appeal times.

While the government and Migri are doing everything possible to get rid of as many asylum seekers from Finland, it’s clear that many refugees cannot return back to their home countries because it’s too dangerous.

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Why did Finland allocate so much money on asylum reception centers that treated in too many cases refugees like “livestock?”

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Who watches over, never mind defends, the rights of asylum seekers?

The Supermen*

In 2015 and 2016 some 38,000 asylum seekers [1] came to Finland and scores of asylum reception centers sprung up rapidly throughout the country to house these people. Even if the government’s answer to the ever-growing number of asylum seekers was “to make Finland unattractive for asylum seekers,” these people did a service to Finland by helping expose our ineffective and costly immigration and integration policy.

Disagree? How is it possible that it takes for some migrants 5-7 years before they can knock on the door of an employer and ask for a job?

Why is migrant unemployment many times higher than the national average?

Why do migrants get paid on average 25% less than white Finns?

It’s clear that there’s a lot of work to be done to lessen the pay gap between migrants and white Finns and lower high unemployment levels.

Fabrication or the truth?

An anti-racist colleague at the recently held Golden Family Awards in Helsinki exposed an interesting problem about our reporting of asylum seekers this year.

“When I started to read [the first] stories [from January] about that abuses that asylum seekers were suffering at reception centers, the first matter that crossed my mind was if they are true because they were so unbelievable,” the person said. “How could people in our country treat others in such a terrible manner?”

For Migrant Tales, 2016 was the year of investigative journalism. We published 128 news stories on asylum reception centers, interviewed scores of asylum seekers, and got in touch with many newspapers. Our efforts helped us to get the deputy manager of the Kolari asylum reception center fired.

Asylum seekers who are minors wrote a letter to Pitäjänuutiset in the fall explaining why they are seeking asylum in Finland.

Our network of sources involves comprises of a journalist and Arab-speakers who know the asylum-seeker situation in Finland as well as the back of their hand.

In the beginning, nobody wanted to write about such abuses never mind read about the terrible stories we started to expose to the public. When Migrant Tales approached Helsingin Sanomat in January,  the reporter at Finland’s largest daily gave little importance to the carefully investigated story we sent showing abuses at Luona, a private company controlled by Barona that managed back then reception centers in Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo, and Hyvinkää.

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