As we mentioned in our report in March, Finland’s youth gang problem is a tool used by the Perussuomalaiset and National Coalition Party to tar-and feather migrants. It is an excellent topic to drive home Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s migration policy that will disenfranchise such people.
In an Ykkösaamu interview Saturday, apart from Interior Minister Mari Rantanen’s occasional awkward giggles, the interview left out one important question: the roots of Sweden’s gang violence problem.
If you ask Rantanen, she will blame the problem on immigration policy and the “wrong” type of migration. She will not mention a word about Sweden’s exclusive and class society and the lack of opportunities for racialized people.
Interior Minister Mari Rantanen. Source: Yle
Certainly government programs and making Finland a more inclusive society for everyone would be a difficult question for Rantanen to answer because the government is tightening immigration policy and slashing social welfare and services to migrants.
Her answer is a dog whistle: Blame it all on the wrong kind of migrants.
Some of the tightening of government migration policy include limited three-year use of paid interpreters, and linking your knowledge of Finnish language to getting social welfare, among others.
Rantanen called the latter “incentives” even if they are really ultimatums.
If the inteior minister and other politicians of her ilk mistrust certain migrant groups like Muslims, there is a flaw in the way they look at adaption. Rantanen believes that learning the Finnish language, which is important, is a panacea for all your adaption problems.
Another problem about Rantanen, the government and police is context. In Sweden there are up to 30,000 people in gangs while in Finland the numbers are minute, or about 150.
Even so, Rantanen likes to speak in the conditional and future tenses of a potential problem that does not exist today.
“What is essential is that we do not shy away from the [youth gang] phenomenon or fail to address this trend [in time],” she was quoted as saying on Ykkösaamu.
Even if Orpo’s government claims that the tightening of immigration rules doesn’t make it racist because it is in line with other Nordic countries, then we can conclude that all Nordic countries have racist immigration policies.
Before the election in 2022, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s minority government, which cooperates with the far-right Sweden Democrats, proposed to deal with the country’s gang violence problem with tougher measures and laws.
Such policies have been an abject failure and now the government is considering calling the army to help out.
If there is one matter that became clear from the interview with Rantanen, it is the government’s restrictive immigration that will end in failure because it is based on prejudiced opinions.
