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Helsingin Sanomat @hsfi published an article today about the misery of my dealings with the immigration bureaucracy, MIGRI Thanks @senjalarsen for highlighting this! I am not sure if Finns use the word “Kafkaesque” to describe these situations, but that would be accurate.
I have dozens of messages to MIGRI which begin: “As I said in my four prior emails...” and end with “Can someone please respond?”
The most absurd of the many dehumanizing moments was when someone finally *did* respond to one of my messages in which I complained that their uploading system would silently fail
and the documents I was uploading did not appear in their system, after, say 10-15 attempts, trying to compress the docs 10 different ways (which documents, by the way, a Migri agent had already reviewed at my last in-person meeting, but inexplicably asked me to upload from home)
The email linked to a video explaining the difference between file formats like.jpg and .png. Here it is: https://migri.fi/en/online-services#adding
I almost cried. There was no way of explaining that back in 1995 I had been one of the first three graphic designers at the first web design agency in Silicon Valley and had been tasked with determining which compression formats we should be using.
I realized I was not a human being but a number in a file. This was the last communication I had with MIGRI.
As with pretty much everything else in Finland, Finland works if you fit into the box the bureaucracy has created and defined. If you, for whatever reason, don’t fit neatly into that box, it is disastrous.
And if you haven't seen it, watch the infantilizing Migri uploading documents video I mentioned above. Can anyone explain why the immigration applicant is depicted as a cartoon bubble that doesn't speak but babbles like a baby?
Whether by design or accident, it's great that Helsingin Sanomate @hsfi and @senjalarsen published this article on International Migrants Day! https://www.un.org/en/observances/migrants-day
