Migrant Tales got a phone call Thursday from an Iraqi woman* who spoke a few words of English. “Do you speak German?” she asked.
An Arabic-speaker called later the forty-year-old woman, who is one of the thousands of unlucky asylum seekers facing deportation after Finland decided to tighten its immigration policy.
The woman’s woes do not only hinge on deportation but to the fact that she is a single mother of two: her son is seven and her daughter, who suffers from mental problems and requires psychiatric help, is eight years old.
Considering the harsh lives that these asylum seekers have endured in their home countries, their misery doesn’t end in Europe but is exacerbated in some cases.
The woman, who claims to be suffering from cancer, is feeling desperate for her children and for herself.
Some pictures of when her children on the left are sleeping at the railway station, where they were picked up by the police and taken to a hospital. The Italian police collected money between themselves to buy refugees food, according to her. The single mother has lost contact with her husband.
If there is a silver lining in this family’s story, it’s that they won’t be deported back to Iraq but to Italy.
Even so, Italy is no solution to her ordeal since she’ll be forced to live on the street with her children because the Italian government won’t offer her any social assistance. Apart from renting a flat, how is the single mother going to pay for her daughter’s psychiatric care and cancer treatment?
The woman’s legal situation in Europe has been a long and complex path: She was given asylum in Germany in 2009, where she lived five years. She was then deported back to Iraq but returned to Italy last year, where she got a permit to stay. She moved to Finland three months ago but will be deported.
The single mother is staying at an asylum reception center in Helsinki.
* If the Finnish media is interested in contacting and writing about this woman’s plight, you can get in touch directly with Migrant Tales at 040 8400773 or [email protected].
If she had asylum in Germany, why was she deported back to Iraq? If we assume this story is true, I am sorry for her, but the asylum system is not meant for persons whose problem is poverty or poor health.
Having said that, this is a good example of the thing I warned many months ago on Migrant Tales. I said that by allowing welfare refugees to enter our countries, the system will collapse and then even persons who would need asylum for real humanitarian reasons, won’t be able to get it anymore.
If there would have been only small number of asylum seekers or “migrants” to Finland, Finland would probably still have our own category of asylums given for humanitarian reasons for persons who don’t fulfill the criteria for real refugees, but to whom asylum could be given for other humanitarian reasons. But now, because of greediness by unscrupulous scammers and persons who are trying to attract maximum number of welfare refugees here, the government is slowly starting to act in order to stop this unsustainable mass immigration from developing countries, hopefully before our country totally collapses.