9/25/15, "'Finland's no good': Disappointed migrants turn back," AFP, Tornio, Finland, Anne Kauranen
"Hundreds of predominantly Iraqi migrants who
have travelled through Europe to reach Finland are turning back, saying
they don't want to stay in the sparsely-populated country on Europe's
northern frontier because it's too cold and boring.
Migrants have in recent weeks been crossing back into Sweden at the
Haparanda-Tornio border just an hour's drive south of the Arctic Circle,
and Finnish authorities have seen a rise in the number of cancelled
asylum applications.
"You can tell the world I hate Finland. It's
too cold, there's no tea, no restaurants, no bars, nobody on the
streets, only cars," 22-year-old Muhammed told AFP in Tornio, as the
mercury struggled to inch above 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) on a
recent blustery grey day.
He had already travelled from Tornio to
the capital Helsinki almost 750 kilometres (465 miles) south, and then
back up to the Tornio border again to return to Sweden....
Another
group of around 15 Iraqi refugees waiting at the bus station that
Tornio shares with its Swedish twin town Haparanda also said they wanted
to go back to southern Sweden.
"Finland is no good," the men echoed each other.
Sweden may be just as cold as Finland, but Sweden has bigger immigrant communities because of a longer history of integration.
On
September 19, several busloads of migrants made U-turns on the Swedish
side when they saw hundreds of Finns form a "human barrier" on the
Finnish side to protest against the sudden influx of migrants.
Anti-immigrant
sentiment may be prompting some migrants to leave Finland, where the
populist Finns Party is the second-biggest political party. Early
Friday, around 40 demonstrators -- including one dressed in a Ku Klux
Klan outfit -- threw fireworks at a bus transporting asylum seekers to a
new reception centre in the southern city of Lahti.
Another incident took place late Thursday in Kouvola, in
southeastern Finland, when a 50-year-old man threw a petrol bomb at an
emergency housing facility for asylum seekers.
It
is difficult to know exactly how many migrants are heading back to
Sweden, since some don't even register in Finland before leaving. But
according to the Finnish Immigration Service's head of asylum
applications, Esko Repo, "by last week around 200 applications from
Iraqi asylum seekers had expired," meaning the applicant had either
withdrawn it or disappeared.
Finland has registered over 14,000
asylum seekers so far this year, and it expects a total of at least
30,000 by the end of the year -- eight times as many as in 2014.
But Repo said cancellations were on the rise, and registrations were taking longer because of the recent influx of migrants.
And
the 30,000 expected this year may end up dropping: media reports said
some Iraqis were posting self-shot videos of Helsinki on a Facebook page
popular among Iraqi migrants to dissuade others from coming.
Around
500 migrants are arriving in Tornio each day, an influx that has
stunned the tranquil town of 20,000 inhabitants and put its
infrastructure to the test, even though most migrants are just passing
through.
"The flow from the border has been out of control. I have
been scared and have avoided going shopping in the evenings because we
don't know who these people are," a 66-year-old pensioner who gave her
name as Kirsti, told AFP.
Up to 1,000 migrants are estimated to be in Tornio on a given day, according to police and migration officials....
Finnish authorities
have expressed concern about finding housing for all the refugees if the
influx continues, despite new facilities opening every week.
Some locals said the influx was putting too much strain on the country in the middle of its own economic woes.
"We
should close the border and check who these people are. Iraqis should
be sent straight back since their country is not at war," a metal worker
and one of the organisers of the border protest, Eero Yrjanheikki, told
AFP."
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