Think Comment Analyse: A modern-day slavery is flourishing in Britain, and we just avert our eyes

A modern-day slavery is flourishing in Britain, and we just avert our eyes

Madeleine Bunting

The Guardian

18 Dec 2006

Europe in 2003, hoping to start a new life beyond the reach of the torture and prisons of Saddam Hussein’s regime in northern Iraq. But after four years of failed asylum applications in the UK, he is still living in fear.

He’s too nervous to tell his story inside the cafe where we meet for fear of eavesdroppers, so we sit outside. He flinches as a policewoman passes. He says he never answers a knock on his front door at home in Birmingham; friends know to call first to tell him they are coming.

He knows — as the Home Office officials remind him on his monthly required visits to sign in — that he could be deported at any time and sent back to Iraq. He could be snatched from the streets or from his bed in the middle of the night. But, as he is well aware, there is nothing unusual about his plight — he is just one individual out of an army of irregular migrants, which the Home Office estimates at more than half a million strong. They precariously exist in a kind of bureaucracy-made limbo in this country.

Deportation is not the only fear he lives with. He needs urgent kidney treatment, but an operation would require several months’ convalescence. If he can’t work, who will pay his rent or food? He knows his kidney malfunction is slowly getting worse. “I came here to survive, not to die slowly.” He rubs tears from his cheeks.

He works in a kitchen — and he apologises for it. He knows that he’s not allowed to work but explains that after his asylum appeal was refused two years ago and he was ejected from the hostel and his vouchers were stopped, he had no alternative. He got himself false papers and his employer doesn’t press him for his national insurance number. The arrangement suits them both. Nehad gets 182 net for a 40-hour week, and the employer gets cheap hard labour with no sick or holiday pay. Nehad will be working through Christmas.

Nehad counts himself as one of the lucky ones. He knows someone who bought an old car for 50 just to sleep in it. Nehad rents for 100 a week, which leaves enough to pay the bills, and feed and clothe himself. He sometimes helps out other irregulars who are worse off.

“There is another, terrible life underground in this country. The government calls us illegals, but how can a human being be illegal? We are here, and we are human beings. People ask me what my hope for the future is; I don’t have a right to hope, but what I would like is to hold my head up high and tell people, this is who I am.”

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