Conservative National Coalition Party speaker of parliament, Paula Risikko, was quoted as saying in Senäjoki-based daily Ilkkathat she is concerned about the role of Christians in Finland.
“Was it easier before to be religious,” she was quoted as asking in Keskisuomalainen. “For example, it’s not as easy today to bring one’s religious views at work. Christians are being pushed in a closet at the same time when other [religions] are coming out of the closet.”
Behind that smile and her Marimekko shirt, lies a sinister ideology that sees migrants, especially Muslims, as a threat to Finland. Read the full story (in Finnish) here.
Certainly one reason for Risikko’s latest comment is the parliamentary elections of April 14, 2019, and the EU elections the following month. Does Risikko believe that stoking the flames of “us” and “them” will give short-term political gains?
Do her comments target Muslims and other minorities? Does it reveal her white fragility? Or are they a glimpse of how politicians in Finland continue to lurch towards cheap nationalism with the help of “us” and “them?”
While I was not surprised by Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s comments about migration and the rise of the far right in YLE’s Ykkösaamu talk show, the interview offers a good example of how his government continues to fuel Finland’s hostile environment for migrants.
According to Adrian Berry, a leading UK immigration lawyer, defined in inThe Guardian, the term hostile environment: “It is a series of legislative initiatives to make it much more difficult to lead an ordinary life in the UK, but secondly, a change in direction in the way the Home Office assesses individual people.”
This definition by Berry offers us the opportunity to assess the hostile environment for migrants in Finland. In the same manner, Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government has tightened immigration laws which in turn has changed radically the way Finland assesses people from certain countries, especially Muslims from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anti-immigration rhetoric and mistrust have made the lives of migrants and minorities more difficult because they encourage social ills like racism and discrimination.
Sipilä’s comments in YLE’s Ykkössmu talk show how much in the dark the prime minister- Blaming the riots in Chemnitz on “uncontrolled immigration” is sticking one’s head in the sand.
The reason why Sipilä invested few words in the show on the threat of the far right in Europe is either because he is in denial or ignorant of the problem in a European historical context. Remember the slippery slope that led to Nazi Germany’s final solution?
A recent editorial in The Guardianwrote the following about the demonstrations in Chemnitz: “It is disturbing to see a far-right mob rampage through the streets of any city but, for obvious historical reasons, the scene is uniquely distressing in Germany.”
OK, you don’t believe in the liberal media. Let’s look at what Spiegel Online of Germany wrote: “In Chemnitz, refugees find themselves under threat by neo-Nazis and hooligans. Politicians have pledged to take a hard line against right-wing extremist violence, but they look helpless nonetheless. Meanwhile, the right wing seems to have the upper hand in Saxony.”
Veikka Lahtinen tweets: “When the prime minister explains that “uncontrolled immigration” is the cause for the racist demonstrations in Germany, you can guess that [parliamentary and EU elections] are less than a year off, and that in Finland the only center-right response to the extreme right is to use the same language.”
“Chemnitz, Saxony’s third-biggest city, has become a symbol of the relentless rise of the hard right in Germany. At a series of demonstrations this week, young men in black hoodies changed ‘Germany for the Germans’ and ‘Foreigners Out.’ A country that thought it had long ago laid Nazism to rest was confronted with its ugly rebirth.”
Prime Minister Sipilä’s interview revealed how much of a bubble – like the EU – the prime minister inhabits. Sipilä actually believes that by raising the number of quota refugees from 750 to 1,500 will help alleviate the so-called immigration crisis.
What Sipilä conveniently forgot to offer are the solutions to stop people from migrating to Europe from regions like Africa. Without even offering a shred of evidence, he suggested too many of them were economic migrants.
As a Latin American, and after so much meddling in our politics and economy by Washington, my family decided to migrate to the United States because there wasn’t a bright enough future in Argentina.
If you have not solved the “migration problem” up to now, it is only a pipedream to believe it will be solved in the near future. Matters will only get worse.
Prime Minister Sipilä’s comments reinforce how much in the dar he and his government is on immigration and a slew of other issues.
Conservative National Coalition Party Minister of the Interior Kai Mykkänen announced Friday that an independent inquiry of the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) will be launched, according to YLE. The minister said, however, that the independent inquiry should not be seen as a lack of trust in Migri’s work, which has had to process some 45,000 residence permit applications.
Calls for an independent inquiry of Migri, which could be carried out by UNHCR, has the support of opposition parties like the Social Democrats, the Greens, and Swedish People’s Party as well as of NGOs like Amnesty International, Finnish Refugee Council, and the Non-Discrimination Ombudsman.
Frank Johnson, the director of Finland’s Amnesty International chapter, welcomed the announcement by Mykkänen. He said that the independent inquiry, called for by Amnesty International, Finnish Refugee Council, and the Non-Discrimination Ombudsman, was “a good decision.”
Even if Migri has processed 45,000 residence permits since 2015, when a record 32,477 asylum seekers mostly from Iraq, it does not let them off the hook and permit civil servants to make faulty decisions that impact people’s lives or their deaths in some cases.
Mykkäen said that “there is no evidence that suggests that Migri rejects asylum applications systematically.
Part of the of criticism of Migri is due to their interpretation that countries like Afghanistan, where the security situation has deteriorated, and Iraq are “safe” to deport asylum seekers.
Some believe that the large amount of rejections of asylum applications by Migri is politically influenced. Since 2015, the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, which split into two factions in June 2017, was invited to form part of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government. This has fuelled a hostile environment for migrants in Finland.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13 into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. Despite the name changes, we believe that it is the same party in different clothing. Both factions are hostile to cultural diversity. One is more open about it while the other is more diplomatic.
A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.
You hear a lot from anti-immigration politicians like the Perussuomalaiset* and even the police about how we must contain “Sweden’s immigrant problem” from coming to Finland. If you analyze such a claim and weigh its truth you will rapidly arrive at the following conclusions: It is racist and untrue.
It is racist because it paints migrants with a single brush. The claim suggests that migrants are the cause of crime, rape, no-go zone lawlessness, abuse the system, and destroyed our near-perfect society.
Dead wrong. For starters, Sweden was never a near-perfect society. That is a myth.
A number of studies also confirm that migrants do not bring more crime. Here is an article on the myth of migrant crime in the United States. The link between immigration and crime only exists in the imagination of some people.
The Conversation writes about crime levels in Europe: “Similarly, a large-scale European study on the effects of immigration on crime concluded that while an increase in immigration generally does not affect crime levels, it does go hand-in-hand with increased public anxiety and anti-immigration stances.”
The argument by some xenophobic politicians that there is a link between immigration and crime is simply untrue and exaggerated.
Instead of fueling hatred and polarizing society between “us” and “them,” the fact that politicians and the media believe that there is a link between immigration and crime poses something more worrying about ourselves: racism, ethnonationalism, and denial with a capital “D.”
The fact that politicians and the media continue to support such untrue claims reveals as well their lack of leadership and deep-seated prejudices based on racism, which are alive and well and which have always existed in such countries.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13 into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. Despite the name changes, we believe that it is the same party in different clothing. Both factions are hostile to cultural diversity. One is more open about it while the other is more diplomatic.
A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.
Perussuomalaiset (PS)* vice president Laura Huhtasaari, a vocal Islamophobic anti-immigration politician, has been since January under scrutiny due to the plagiarism found in her Master’s thesis.
If you read the reaction of the Finnish media about the latest ruling by the University of Jyväskylä, one common theme is that the plagiarism scandal will not affect Huhtasaari never mind the PS.
The whole affair is a bit like Donald Trump, who hops from one scandal to the next. Scandals don’t appear to hurt the US president but strengthen his support base.
Is the Huhtasaari plagiarism scandal one good sign of the Trumpization of Finnish politics and how the anti-immigration party has poisoned politics in Finland since its historic election victory of 2011?
Laura Huhtasaari has made a name for herself with her Islamophobic statements and her support for US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. She has been called a number of things like the Islamophobe with the kindergarten teacher smile.
Huhtasaari, who is a teacher, got a damning report from the University of Jyväskylä this week concerning her master’s thesis. According to a statement by the University of Jyväskylä, Huhtasaari’s thesis “had a disregard for good scientific practice and dishonesty in the form of plagiarism, according to Helsinki Times.
The statement states the following about Huhtasaari’s thesis, which was approved in 2003: “For their part, the procedures have misled the scientific community of researchers and the authors of future theses. plagiarism nature and scope, the violations of good scientific practice are serious,” reads a press release from the University of Jyväskylä.
Huhtasaari’s thesis cannot be revoked by the university since there is a five-year statute of limitations.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13 into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. Despite the name changes, we believe that it is the same party in different clothing. Both factions are hostile to cultural diversity. One is more open about it while the other is more diplomatic.
A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.
Even if the Blue Reform*, which is an offshoot of the Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS), wants to change the constitution so that non-Finnish citizens would get paid less social welfare than Finnish citizens, the suggestion by MP Simon Elo exposes to the tee the racism of his party and hatred of migrants.
Blue Reform, like the PS, are not only a danger to our Nordic welfare state and democracy, but a threat to migrants and minorities living in Finland.
The fact that a party in government wants to officialize discrimination reveals the extent of racism in the government and why this social ill has worsened under Prime Minister Juha Sipilä.
Such discrimination that Elo proposes isn’t possible because it is unconstitutional. Section 6 of the Finnish constitution expressly states:
“Everyone is equal before the law. No one shall, without an acceptable reason, be treated differently from other persons on the ground of sex, age, origin, language, religion, conviction, opinion, health, disability or other reason that concerns his or her person.”
Finland will hold parliamentary election in April 2019, which explains why Blue Reform is so eager to take out its racism card in order to attract similar-minded voters.
Blue Reform’s support, according to various polls, is dismal, or under 1%.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13 into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. Despite the name changes, we believe that it is the same party in different clothing. Both factions are hostile to cultural diversity. One is more open about it while the other is more diplomatic.
A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.
A year has elapsed after a Moroccan went on the rampage on August 18 and started attacking people indiscriminately with a knife in the southwestern city of Turku. Two people were killed and 10 were wounded.
On the anniversary of the stabbing, which is seen by the authorities as Finland’s first modern terrorist attack, three far-right and neo-Nazi groups organized a march to commemorate the anniversary. Another group called Turku Without Nazis (Turku ilman natseja) organized a countermarch to protest the presence of the three far-right groups: Nordic Resistance Movement(Pohjoismainen vastarintaliike, PVL), Soldiers of Odin, and “188” or Nationalist Alliance (Kansallismielisten liittouma).
What went largely unnoticed by most of the Finnish media was the participation of an anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP, Kike Elomaa, and two members of her party. All three took part in the demonstration organized by the far-right and neo-Nazi groups.
Some may rightfully ask why far-right groups have grown in this country and elsewhere. The answer to that question is simple: Far-right- and neo-Nazi-leaning parties like the PS have allowed them in places like parliament.
PS MP Kike Elomaa and two party members taking part in the far-right and neo-Nazi demonstration in Turku on Saturday. Source: Ilta-Sanomat.
At the heart of the problem is also Finland’s difficulty in seeing and condemning far-right and neo-Nazi groups.
As US political scientists Steven Levisky and Daniel Ziblatt stated in their analysis of President Trump’s administration, “The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”
Our blindness to the threat posed by far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Finland is a good example of how the erosion of our democracy is happening before our eyes and in baby steps.
The silence of the politicians to such threats, especially that of the government of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, is another problem promoting extremist groups.
Even if far-right groups like to talk about free speech, their aim could not be further from the truth. Their aim is not more democracy but less of it.
It is up to us to stand up and draw the line between us and far-right groups and neo-Nazis. If we do not do it, nobody else will do it for us.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13 into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. Despite the name changes, we believe that it is the same party in different clothing. Both factions are hostile to cultural diversity. One is more open about it while the other is more diplomatic.
A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.
A week after Fayaz has stopped his 10-day hunger strike by the insistence of nurse and caseworkers, he has published a video from his cell in the Metsälä reception center for migrants.
In the video (Published by Fayaz and Ahmad Hosseini a local activist) he is giving an update about his situation, his case, the unbelievable stress, uncertainty about his life and his future. He mentioned that he has even prepared himself to die!
Simply for being a refugee, and someone who has fled a dangerous situation, he is treated as a criminal by the law enforcement and Helsinki Police. The reason that given to him for his detention in Metsälä Reception Center is that he has left Finland to another country! In this video, he makes clear that the reason why he fled to Luxembourg from Finland was due to the fear of deportation.
After a conversation with him last week, he mentioned that his friend who fled to Luxembourg with him is now accepted as an asylum seeker in Luxemburg. Fayaz is afraid of Taliban for hostility towards him and his family. In 2013, his father went missing in Ghazni, and he fled Afghanistan in 2015.
Here is the note I published on Facebook after the meeting with Fayaz:
“This morning, I had the privilege of meeting Fayaz at Metsälä Migrant Removal Center, which was basically a low-level security prison. Some spaces in this world cannot be described by words so I don’t even try. He was on the 9th day of hunger strike and very weak but had such a warm presence that I will probably never forget in my life. I wish that we can at least get him out of there. Everyone should know that “Refugees are not criminals and they are welcome here” and human life has to be preserved.
Just this week there was a new wave of attacks around Afghanistan in Ghazni and Kabul where NewYork Times called it: “Dream of a Better Life in Afghanistan Ends in a Hilltop Grave for Students” and Amnesty identified the attacks as “War Crime”. Simultaneously, Mohammad Javid a local activist has published a tweet about the recent deportation to Afghanistan carried by Suomen Poliisi
Migrant Tales in a recent post has compared Finnish Migration policies to Trump’s USA and it’s zero tolerance migration policies. And Helsinki’s Stop Deportations group has published an interview with Finnish ambassador in Afghanistan during the “Afghan women Film festival” in Espoo, talking about the current unsafe situation of Afghanistan.
For how long will the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) with the backing of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government continue to maintain that Iraq is a “safe” country to deport asylum seekers? The latest victim of this flawed policy is 33-year-old Harith Mana’thar Badr Alsilmawi, who sought asylum in 2015 and died on Wednesday in Basra.
Migrant Talesreported in October 2016 of two Iraqi asylum seekers who returned to their home country and were killed.
Harith Mana’thar Badr Alsilmawi in Finland during better days. Source: Facebook.
According to a source who has been in touch with Harith Mana’thar Badr Alsilmawi’s relatives in Iraq, the young asylum seeker was apprehended by the police, tortured and then killed.
“There are conflicting stories about Alsilmawi’s deportation to Iraq from Finland,” said the source. “The family in Iraq said that he returned voluntarily while other sources at the Jämsä asylum reception center state that he was detained by the police and forcibly deported.”
Harith Mana’thar Badr Alsilmawi’s death certificate. Source: Facebook.
In March, we wrote about the case of an over sixty-year-old disabled white undocumented migrant whose residence permit had been rejected by the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) because she wanted to live with her daughter and grandchildren.
Finland’s strict immigration policy is that it doesn’t recognize grandparents as part of the nuclear family.
A few years ago, there were two high-profile cases in the Finnish media involving grandmothers. Migri had tried to deport unsuccessfully three times a Russian citizen, Irina Antonova, who had suffered a stroke in Finland while visiting her daughter. Egyptian grandmother Eveline Fadayel was granted a residence permit after a lengthy battle with Migri officials.
In spring, when I spoke to Sheryl* the first time, she had overstayed her visit to Finland and had become an undocumented migrant. Her future in Finland was left to chance until two policemen “barged” in her home this month.
After the police visited her home, Migri gave Sheryl a month to leave the country. Her passport was confiscated and Migri will only return it after she has purchased a plane ticket. She said that she has no will to leave her daughter and family behind or the money yet to buy the plane ticket.
Sheryl said that in North America she has no home and will try to live with friends for 90 days, when she will be able to return back o Finland.
“We are all very upset by what happened,” she said. “I haven’t broken the news to my three grandchildren, who are 3, 5, and 6 years old. I know the news will make them cry.”
Sheryl blames Finland’s “inhumane” immigration policy for separating families.
“My daughter and her children are the only family I have,” she said. “Why can’t I stay if I’m not a drain on the system?”
*The real name of the person was changed and she spoke on condition of anonymity.
