Winter is rapidly approaching and Interior Minister Paula Risikko isn’t too enthused about the idea that the Evangelical Lutheran Church wants to give housing to undocumented migrants, according to YLE.
As everyone knows, the rapid rise of undocumented migrants in Finland is the government’s own doing since it voted in spring to scrap granting residence permits on humanitarian grounds.
One of the direct impacts of the new law was that undocumented migrants in Finland would surge from a few hundred to thousands, according to various estimates.
One of the surprising matters about the whole issue is that it is purely political and originates in an anti-immigration party called the Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, which shares power in government with the Center Party and National Coalition Party (NCP).
It is a good matter that the Evangelical Lutheran Church has not been swayed by the government’s anti-immigration populist rhetoric and taken a stand against leaving undocumented migrants to their own fates as permanent secretary of the interior ministry, Päivi Nerg, recently suggested.
Nerg was quoted as saying in Jyväskylä-based Keskisuomalainen that no emergency accommodation should be given to these migrants because “it would send the wrong message.”
What, Nerg, is the “right message?” Let these people freeze and die outdoors?
Comments like the above, and many others, show us that we should not give the government and politicians the benefit of the doubt when it comes to immigration policy and handling undocumented migrants since most of them are driven by suspicion and opportunism against cultural diversity.
Disagree?
What did the youth leader of the PS, Sebastian Tynkyynen, suggest what should be done to these “migrants who stay illegally?” He stated that they should be interned in closely guarded camps in the forest, where they’d live in tents apparently in subzero temperatures.
Tynkkynen belongs to the PS, which is in government, but nobody in his xenophobic party never mind in the Center Party and NCP have any objections to what he said.
Read the full story (in Finnish) here.
Even if the PS is the last party that doesn’t have a clue how to treat migrants in Finland fairly because they are driven by bigotry, anti-cultural diversity, and racism, it is disappointing to note the silence coming from the government in the face of this rhetoric.
Support for the PS by the Center Party and NCP has caused anti-immigration sentiment to rise and emboldened racists in the same spirit as we tragically saw in Germany and elsewhere in the 1930s.
The use by government representatives of the adjective “illegal” to describe the legal state of a migrant is a good example and prelude of the latter. The first matter that the Nazi regime did in Germany to villify Jews was to declare that that they were “illegal.”
Parties in the government are doing exactly the same thing but in a different time context by demonizing asylum seekers who are Muslims and come from countries like Iraq.
For Migrant Tales, an attack against undocumented migrants in Finland is an attack on all migrants and minorities in Finland. Too many politicians and the government have been forgotten an important matter: They too represent in parliament minorities and our ever-growing culturally diverse society.
Now, however, they look more like mean people who have nothing better to do but to scapegoat us for their failures.
* 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. The direct translation of “Perussuomalaiset” is “basic” or “fundamental Finn.”
So basically you want people to have right to stay here no matter are they refugees or not. What is the point of assessing if people need refugee if they can stay here anyways? What is the point of immigration regulations if you believe people should have right to stay here anyways with welfare support?
What you want is open doors immigration which would destroy Finland.