Boldbaatar, the newspaper wrote, graduated as a nurse in Helsinki in May 2020, in the middle of Finland’s first wave of coronavirus infections. After working for a couple of months in the internal medicine department of the Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS), he voluntarily moved to the intensive care unit to treat Covid-19 patients.
In December 2020, Migri denied his permit application and issued a deportation order banning him from entering the Schengen area for two years, accusing him of presenting forged documents. It declined to specify whether the allegation related to payslips, bank statements or employment contracts he had submitted as proof of his earnings, arguing that disclosing the information would be against “a very important public interest”.
The agency also considered the short-term nature of his employment at HUS and the City of Helsinki’s home care service unit. She had started working part-time in nursing as soon as she had completed the required number of credits.
Boldbaatar learned the exact nature of the allegations only after he was called in for police questioning in May 2021. Migri, the questioning revealed, accused him of presenting bank statements that contained “so many misstatements” that they could not be genuine.
He told the newspaper that it took him a few minutes to realize the “miscalculations” were a misinterpretation of a feature he was using on Revolut, a banking service headquartered in London. The feature automatically reserves a small amount for savings on every payment made from the account.
Migri stated in its inquiry request that the transactions were not accurately reflected in the account balance, and that it was “unlikely” that the account could be debited in two different ways at the same time.
The prosecutor decided not to press charges in the case in August 2022.
The Helsinki Administrative Court overturned the denial of the permit and returned the case to Migri on November 1. It also faulted the agency for rejecting the application based on mere suspicion and for not disclosing the reasons for its decision, which violated his due process rights.
However, Boldbaatar, who got full-time employment in January 2022, had had enough and left Finland at the end of November. – After this, I couldn’t imagine staying in Finland.
“Kafkaesque”
Mayor of Helsinki Juhana Vartiainen (NCP) described the incident on Saturday as Kafkaesque.
“This and many other experiences show that even if the direction of social goals and decision-making changes, it is difficult to change the way the old agency operates,” he commented on Twitter.
Migri, he reminded, was originally founded specifically to prevent foreigners from entering Finland. He also saw that the agency is “light years” behind the good service culture of other agencies, such as the Tax Administration.
The guard said Ilkka Haahtela, Migri’s newly appointed CEO, can hopefully bring about a change in the operating culture. Haahtela previously served as the director of employment and immigration affairs for the City of Helsinki.
Haahtela also participated in the online discussion started by the Helsingin Sanomat article.
“My first comment is a genuine and deep apology to our customer and Finland,” he wrote in his first statement on Twitter.
Risto SiilasmaaA member of the board of F-Secure saw that a completely new agency should be established in order to get rid of the operating culture that has made it impossible to launch services that attract foreign labor to sectors suffering from Finland’s chronic labor shortage. .
“For this purpose, we should create a new agency so that you can build the appropriate culture from the ground up,” he opined.
Anne Brunila, the former director of Fortum, asked if this would attract skilled labor to Finland. “A person gets a nurse’s education and a permanent job in Finland, but Migri makes a deportation order because of his own stupid mistake,” he criticized.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
Source: The Nordic Page