PS party secretary Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo said today on Suomen Uutiset, a PS publication, that four out of five people that flee to Europe from Northern Africa and the Middle East aren’t refugees but economic migrants and welfare shoppers.
Considering that Slunga-Poutsalo, who is a member of extremist MEP Jussi Halla-aho’s anti-immigration wing of the PS, uses such words to describe people fleeing from war-torn countries like Syria begs a serious question:
Why should the government allow such language to be used by one of its coalition partners?
What else did Slunga-Poutsalo say?
“Such healthy men in such an age group [18-50 years] defended the fatherland [in worse times in Finland],” she claimed. “For this reason they don’t appear to qualify as refugees.”
Read full story (in Finnish) here.
Another incredible claims that the PS party secretary makes in Suomen Uutiset is that the anti-immigration party has warned about the rise of refugees to Finland. She claimed that social welfare was one reason why refugees are coming to Finland and that such aid helped to pay human traffickers, which are in a more profitable business than the drug trade.
* The Finnish name of the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English-language names 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.