Migrant tales - Page 287 of 535

The Finnish government shrinks in the face of the humanitarian crisis in Europe

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Migrant Tales

The Finnish government is sending mixed messages about its role in the humanitarian crisis that Europe faces today. A good example of the latter is Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s announcement last week when he offered his home to refugees but last Friday the government unveiled plans to demote refugees that get a residence permit to second-class status.

Even if such moves are considered unconstitutional since in Finland everyone is equal before the law, we shouldn’t be surprised at what is happening because we have a populist party like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* in government that is trying to save face on the backs of refugees and our culturally diverse community.

Read full story here.

Foreign Minister and PS chairman, Timo Soini, announced Friday 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 move is similar to what Denmark did in August, when approved by a slim vote to cut monthly benefits to refugees and other migrants by 45% from 10,849 krona (1,454 euros) to 5,945 krona (797 eur).

For those who don’t know, the Islamophobic Danish People’s Party (DPP) is calling the government shots in that country. The DPP is a close political and ideological ally of the PS.

Continue reading “The Finnish government shrinks in the face of the humanitarian crisis in Europe”

Finland says yes to Commission refugee scheme but is still wishy-washy about its role in the crisis

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Migrant Tales

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.

Hate email to Migrant Tales

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Every now and then we get hate email like the one below. We also get kudos from readers.

I got the email below on September 4 and thought whether I should publish it or not. The person who sent it is most likely a white European and is a good example that some foreigners can be just as racist as the worst Finn.

They have the same ability to make a horse’s ass out of themselves.

_________________

Institute of Race Relations: When solidarity fails

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Liz Fekete

In observations made at a side-meeting of the 87th session of the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD),[1] the IRR’s director warned that Europe’s mishandling of the refugee crisis is fuelling racism.

I want to talk about the immediate institutional crisis in the EU, as hostility grows towards a modest plan by the European Commission to relocate a little over 32,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy. The failure of the member states to rise to the humanitarian challenge posed by the boat people arriving via the Mediterranean Sea, the mean-spirited and positively hostile response of some governments, both national and regional, and the breakdown of solidarity between the receiving countries and their richer neighbours, has had consequences. These consequences need to be discussed in terms of cause and effect, in order to fully grasp the intersection between the breakdown of a humanitarian approach to asylum and the growth of racism.

But I would first like to frame my points by making two short observations. First, failures in the institutional response should not blind us to the absolute heroism of ordinary people and over-stretched civil society actors such as Refugees Welcome (Germany), Caritas (Austria) and Migszol (Hungary) who are feeding, clothing and welcoming the new arrivals. Second, we must recognise that the current lack of political leadership, and the failure to find adequate and secure accommodation, is not something new. What I will describe serves merely as the top layer of an existing situation. Europe has fallen far short of providing a safe haven for displaced people, and deaths of migrants do not just occur in tragic circumstances at Europe’s borders. The fact that deaths inside accommodation or removal centres, or as the result of enforced destitution, are met with official indifference, suggests continuity with the moral inertia towards border deaths [2]. The Institute of Race Relations recently published an audit of 160 asylum-and immigration-related deaths within EU States between 2010 and 2015, 46 per cent of which were by suicide, as desperation reached epidemic proportions.

Scaremongering in the media

Continue reading “Institute of Race Relations: When solidarity fails”

The PS of Finland: Can you teach a bigot new tricks?

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Migrant Tales

When the national media gave the racist narrative of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* the benefit of the doubt, Migrant Tales never did and never will. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? If you are naive you probably think you can.

Time magazine quoted Migrant Tales a day after at the 2011 parliamentary elections because we were one of the few who wrote critically about the PS. Time writes in its global briefing page for April 18, 2011:

“We are not extremists so you can sleep safely,” says the head the country’s ascendant ‘True Finns’ party (yes, that’s their real name). Of course, not everybody agrees: Far-right populism is an illness inflicting Europe at present and it now has a beachhead in Finland, writes Enrique Tessieri.”

Nothing has changed since April 17, 2011 except that the PS has today more power than ever before since it forms part of the government with the Center Party and National Coalition Party.

I stand firmly by what I wrote in 2011: The PS is and will continue to be an illness inflicting Finland that has already impoverished the country economically, socially and politically.

Some naively believe that the PS can be transformed into a “normal” party by getting rid of its worst racists like PS MP Olli Immonen, MEP Jussi Halla-aho and many others.

Not a chance. The PS grew from near-obscurity to become the second-biggest party in parliament thanks to its xenophobic rhetoric and promises.

Becoming a “normal” party would be synonymous to committing political hara-kiri for the PS.

Read quotes of the day here.

Continue reading “The PS of Finland: Can you teach a bigot new tricks?”

Kotiutuminen tai kotoutuminen?

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Kuulin tänään 20.30 uutisissa sana kotiutuminen sijasta kotoutuminen. Ei ole ensimmäistä kertaa kun olen kuulut sanaa käytetty väärin toimittajan suusta.

Kotoutuminen on aika uusi sanaa suomen kielessä ja se tarkoitta prosessi jolloin maahanmuuttajia sopeutuu meidän yhteiskuntaan.

Kun olet armeijassa ja palaat siviiliin sitten kotiudut.

Katso 13.29 min. kohdasta uutislähetyksestä jossa toimittaja käyttää kotiutuminen sanaa.

Europe has been put in harm’s way by Europeans

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Can Europe honestly look at itself in the mirror today and say it is still a beacon of hope, cultural understanding and respect as we bar refugees, permit the children of these people fleeing war to die on our beaches while thousands die trying to reach our shores?

According to the UN Refugee Agency, an estimated 310,000 refugees have already crossed the Mediterranean compared with 219,000 refugees for the whole of 2014, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

How many more will have to cross and make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean and die before we wake up to the crisis and find effective solutions on a regional EU level?

The chances of finding such solutions and, importantly leadership in today’s Europe, is close to none.

We have lost our way and live in a bubble inflated by so much hubris that we don’t even grasp that it is our bellicose stand and support for wars like the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that have led us to this crisis.

Things have gotten so bad in some EU countries that populist anti-immigration parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* quote Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s shameful rhetoric. He’s called Calais a “jungle” and refugees as “swarms of people coming across the Mediterranean.”

And to add more salt to injury and shame, European leaders like Cameron conveniently forget that their country’s wealth was built on the blood of millions of slaves, colonialism and global economic bullying and intimidation.
Continue reading “Europe has been put in harm’s way by Europeans”

Alan on Alan: A picture is worth a thousand words

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Alan Anstead

We had the same name, Alan. But apart from that our worlds were completely different. Alan Kurdi was a Syrian Kurd, escaping with his family from war and terrorism. I’m a working class Peckham (London) boy and 50 years older than my namesake was. What the photograph of Alan’s lifeless body washed up on the Turkish beach did was to change public opinion about the biggest movement of refugees since the second world war, in a way that no media article, opinion piece or political speech had been able to do.

Read full opinion piece here.

The situation in the UK before a photo of Alan’s body appeared on the front page of every UK newspaper was one in which the UK government and right-wing media were describing the refugee movement as Africans seeking a better life as “economic migrants”, and describing people in the Calais ‘jungle’ in the most inhumane way possible – “swarms of people” said the Prime Minister, “Migrants marauding around the area” said the Foreign Secretary. Statements designed to frame the issue to suit a government’s anti-migrant policies. In technical terms this communication amounts to propaganda – the intent was untruthful and it was designed to mislead the population.

Continue reading “Alan on Alan: A picture is worth a thousand words”

Reija Härkönen: Terveisiä ääripäästä!

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Reija Härkönen

Ministereiden määritelmän mukaan taidan kuulua ääripäähän. Kuulun siis siihen ääripäähän, joka suhtautuu maahanmuuttoon neutraalisti: toivoo, että rajavalvonta on kunnossa, tänne töihin ja asumaan tulevat ihmiset eivät kohtaa liian suurta byrokratiaa vaan pääsevät jouhevasti kiinni työhön ja elämiseen uudessa kotimaassa. Toivon myös, että maahamme saapuvat pakolaiset ja turvapaikanhakijat saavat ystävällisen, kunnioittavan kohtelun, heidän asiansa käsitellään mahdollisimman nopeasti ja heidät autetaan uuden elämän alkuun.

Rasismia en siedä, politiikassa ja kaikissa yhteiskunnan julkisissa toiminnoissa on oltava rasismia kohtaan nollatoleranssi. Sellainen ääriaktivisti minä olen.

Nyt, kun me ääripään ihmiset olemme innokkaasti tukeneet entisten pakolaisten vilkasta, hyväntuulista Facebook-kampanjaa, #ennenolinpakolainen, jossa he julkaisevat kuvansa ja kertovat lyhyesti tarinansa, olemme olleet todella iloisia. Tuntuu hyvältä nähdä, kuinka monilla entisillä pakolaisilla on hyvää kerrottavaa omasta sopeutumisestaan, edistymisestään opinnoissa, työuralla tai elämässä yleensä. Vieraaseen maahan muuttaminen on aina koko perheelle raskas prosessi. Pakolaisena, ilman mitään omaisuutta, joskus ilman perhettä tulleelle se on aina selviytymistarina.

Continue reading “Reija Härkönen: Terveisiä ääripäästä!”

A red herring called Timo Soini and the PS

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Do you think that Perussuomalaiset (PS)* chairman and foreign minister, Timo Soini, never mind his party, would care less about refugees if most of their energy goes into finding arguments on how to stop Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity?

Soini attempts in his latest blog to raise awareness of refugees of Christian and Yazidi origin by throwing mud at Syrian Muslims and why we shouldn’t open our arms and hearts to such people fleeing war.

Even if Soini wants Europe to give priority to Christian and Yzidi refugees isn’t that what we’re doing? Aren’t refugees being accepted in Europe irrespective of their religious, ethnic or national background?

Soini gets caught again with his hand in the red herring jar.

As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, Soini and the PS are trying their hardest to steer Finland in the direction of Eastern European countries like Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Baltic States.

Prime Minister Juho Sipilä’s pledge to offer his home to refugees Satursday was a clear snub at Soini and his view of how the refugee crisis should be handled, which would mean closing our borders and letting tens of thousands of people out in the cold.

Continue reading “A red herring called Timo Soini and the PS”