While the announcement by Interior Minister Petteri Orpo that Finland will accept 2,400 asylum seekers under a European Commission scheme is a positive step in the right direction, according to YLE in English, what message does it send?
For one, Orpo said that Finland doesn’t support commission plans to have a permanent mechanism to manage the flow of refugees and migrants entering Europe in ever-larger numbers.
While Orpo’s choice of words is a question of semantics, we still don’t have a clear idea what Finland’s role will be in the humanitarian crisis. Is it seeking a European solution or does it want to follow Hungary’s example by treating refugees inhumanely and leaving them out in the cold?
As long as the populist anti-immigration PS is in government we will never know for sure.
Read full story here.
As this government bungles from one crisis to the next, watch closely who makes the announcements.
Timo Soini, PS chairman and foreign minister, naturally spoke to the media about his party’s pet issue: immigrants. He said that the government is studying the possibility of lowering grants given to asylum seekers by 37% to about 200 euros from 318 euros now.
This was exactly what was done in Denmark, where the Islamophobic Danish People’s Party (DPP) is tightening subsidies and immigration policy. The PS and the DPP are close ideological allies.
But that’s not all. The PS is spearheading plans with the government’s blessings to demote asylum seekers that have got residence permits to be treated as second-class members of society.
Soini, who’s been accused of being a turncoat and faces a growing revolt in his party, announced that he wants to de-link funding for asylum-seeker integration programs from the housing benefits system. This means that some migrants will not get the same social welfare benefits as Finns irrespective if they live in Helsinki or Lieksa.
Some analysts believe that such steps are unconstitutional.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.
EU has failed to control this mass movement and it risks collapsing not only the EU itself, but the countries of EU as well. And I blame mostly Germany and Sweden for this as they in practice invited more people than they or even other EU countries are handle with the traditional level of support for refugee seekers. And now Hungary has authorized their army and police to use weapons against the refugee seekers as the situation is so badly out of control and Germany has made their army to be on alerted status because of the situation.
Interestingly, now Germany is going to start doing border checks as the number of refugee seekers is raising to intolerable levels and demands that refugee seekers shouldn’t be able to choose where they live and EU countries should have common level of social support for them, in order to discourage refugee seekers to come to more generous/richer countries instead of less generous/poorer countries.
I think Finland should immediately start border checks on the border between Sweden and Finland and return all refugee seekers from Sweden back to Sweden according the principle of Dublin treaty. After all, Sweden is perfectly safe country for the refugees, as is Denmark, Germany and numerous other countries trough which they come here. Today, over 500 persons arrived to Tornio from Sweden. And eyewitness reports from Sweden tell that instead of registering refugee seekers in Sweden as the Dublin treaty requires, the Swedish officials are escorting very large number of refugee seekers to a train that will arrive Finland tomorrow evening to make them burden of Finland. We must stop this before it is too late and Finland will collapse as we cannot afford to have so many refugee seekers here.
@PS voter You must feel like an idiot knowing that you voted for the PS since they are completely out of their depth in managing the flow of asylum seekers. They have nobody to blame since they are the government.
True BlandaUpp, and the only thing they can do is write declarations of war in Facebook, suggest unconstitutional measures that would make migrants second-class citizens. How dumb can you be?