Jari Ronkainen is a candidate from the town of Hollola near Lahti in the April parliamentary elections. Should it surprise us that he his a member of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party? In a campaign video he divides migrants in two groups: those that integrate and those that don’t. Migrant Tales got in touch with the candidate by phone.
Are you serious about the video?
“Yes I am because the aim is to talk about a topic that [politicians and policy makers] try to avoid,” said Ronkainen.
Apart from being a distasteful video because it portrays migrant groups in a racist and stereotypical manner, the PS candidate doesn’t have a clue when asked how many unemployed migrants there are in Finland.
“I don’t know [the figure] but there are a lot of Somalis that are unemployed,” he added.
Even if the video suggests that the “lazy migrant” got his problem sorted out by sending him back to where he came from in the Middle East, the migrants portrayed have a stereotypical resemblance of Mexicans. The insulting video even uses the word “manana,” which is spelled mañana and means tomorrow in Spanish.
Migrant Tales asked Ronkainen why is he portraying a so-called Arab as a probable Mexican.
“The video is supposed to portray only migrants,” he said.
Lazy person or lazy bum!! Watch the PS candidate’s video here.
So what does this say about a candidate who speaks out against “lazy migrants” but doesn’t have a clue how many migrants are unemployed never mind how he plans to hand out jobs to everyone in Finland?
“It doesn’t matter if migrant unemployment is today small or big in Finland, we have to make sure that these types of people don’t come to Finland,” he said. “I want to bring this to the attention [of the public] so it won’t be a problem in the future.”
It’s a mystery how Ronkainen plans to ensure us if elected how people at the border will be sorted as “hard-working” or “lazy” migrants.
Ronkainen said that those “lazy” migrants that live in Finland cannot be deported back to their home countries because they already live here.
Intolerance can surely distort a person’s world with the help of brute ignorance. In Ronkainen’s world, Mexicans can be from the Middle East with worms that can utter “manana,” or mañana, tomorrow in English. The medic, who is the PS candidate, gives medication to cure the “lazy” migrant. The medication can be taken as a suppository, or anally, according to the medic.
The more you watch this video the uglier its message becomes.
* The English name of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) is officially the Finns Party. The 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.