What life is like for migrants making a new start in Europe
The small boats are relentless – they come almost daily. The threat of another civil war in the Conservative Party looms as Tory backbenchers want Rishi Sunak’s law to stem the tide of radically hardened migrant boats.
And last week, more than 300 desperate people took refuge after an overcrowded boat sank off the coast of Greece.
The tragedies keep coming. Migration rates are at their highest ever, and those who voted for Brexit are demanding answers. It is a Europe besieged by migration, climate change, technology and war.
An explosive and important new book, This is Europeby the author and journalist Ben Judah, shows us how the continent is being remade through two great quests for freedom: migrants from the global south come in search of a better life, and migrants from the east, fleeing war .
It describes the human reality of the phenomenon once these migrants arrive in their new country and how they are forced to adapt to make ends meet through the stories of 23 characters in 23 chapters.
Through these brilliantly vivid descriptions and personal interviews, Judah creates a story about life on the margins of our societies, from the Amazon worker from Syria to the Latvian webcam girl.
In his twenties, Ibrahim fled war-torn Syria as a teenager and made his way to Germany via a long car journey, using false passports. He had big dreams of becoming an actor, but after struggling to find work, he fell into a gap in the Arab porn star market. Photos top left in traditional costume and top right and bottom his new life as a porn star.
In his twenties, Ibrahim fled war-torn Syria as a teenager and made his way to Germany through long car journeys using fake passports.
He says, “It was expensive. I paid $4,000 to enter Greece. I just drove straight to Greece with a fake passport, my fingerprints and all.’
He eventually made it to Germany, where he ended up at school in Cologne and became a victim of vicious bullying. Judah writes, “They had him in classes, in a normal, everyday school, where they looked at him because he didn’t speak German, where they had everything, but they still laughed at him, laughing at his Arabic accent. . He felt so horrible that even now he didn’t even want to think about it.”
Ibrahim had big dreams of becoming an actor, but after struggling to find work, he fell into a gap in the Arab porn star market.
Soon he was flown to Prague for his first shoot, but reveals that he struggled to get hits on his videos, which led him to start his own website, which eventually allowed him to “make it big.”
But his career was met with desperation from his family, “you can’t do this, think of your family,” they inform him.
“What you are doing is disgusting. I order you to stop now.”
And then there is the anger of the local population, ‘disgusting Arab’. we will kill you,’ they write.’
But Ibrahim says he perseveres thanks to his bullies who instilled in him a need to stay in control and choose his own path, not, as he says, the “kebab houses where he really belongs.”
Ionut, a Romanian truck driver who often drives with his girlfriend Cami (together top), says he sees too many bad apples, which gives hard-working Eastern Europeans like him a bad reputation. Ionut sleeps in his truck during his long, hard shifts, bottom left, sharing a simple meal with a colleague in the back of an empty truck
This Is Europe shows how different migrants are from each other, not least in their view of migration. Ionut, a Romanian truck driver who works in England, says he sees too many bad apples giving hard-working Eastern Europeans like him a bad reputation.
He recalls being gassed unconscious while resting at a truck stop in France, allowing thieves to empty his truck.
“It was another immigrant-infested area,” he says contemptuously. “Over the course of several years, I’ve noticed that the thieves are the people of transition. The immigrants. Natives don’t do this sort of thing in Britain or France, or at least in very small percentages. They are the people from Africa, Afghanistan, Romania, Poland. . . people from those countries are the villains,” he adds.
His assessment is brutal: ‘This situation baffles me. The immigrants are taken in as a workforce, provided by England, and in return they do their best to raise the crime rate! Is that how they repay the land for taking up and offering work and good living conditions?’
But Ionut’s story is ultimately a tragedy. No matter how hard he works, he doesn’t seem to improve his lot. “I’m in more debt than I can learn,” he says gloomily.
Pictured is the dingy apartment building and tiny room in Latvia where Nora, 16, was forced to work as a camgirl to raise money to live in Italy where she had earned a scholarship
Another shocking story is that of Nora, a 16-year-old girl from Latvia who takes a job as a camgirl to fund flights to Italy, where she has been awarded a scholarship to the United World Colleges campus.
The book details her shifts in the dingy apartment building that houses the dilapidated camera studio. Her drive to earn the money needed to travel to Italy is the only thing keeping her from eloping, as her clients spam her with messages calling her “a fat bastard” and threatening to “rape her and to kill”.
She spends the evenings crying to chase this dream. The university’s assumption that Nora should be able to afford her flights shows the lack of opportunities for people like her – who have the opportunity but not the resources to better themselves.
Natasha and her husband took to the streets in her hometown of Homyel against the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. All they did was protest peacefully, but in Belarus that is a punishable offence.
When her husband, German, is arrested and sent to prison, she is told that her daughter will be next – a threat that sets off a chain of events that eventually leads her to arrive in Lithuania exhausted and dazed as a refugee.
Pictured above: German before his arrest for protesting in Belarus. Pictured below: German with his daughter Natasha before their lives were torn apart.
Then there is the story of Aboud from Syria, who made a treacherous journey across the Mediterranean in a small boat, nearly dying along the way.
Judah recalls his near-drowning death: “There are two boys next to him. He hears them panic. Talk to himself. Are those prayers they mumble? They are not all together anymore.
‘Over, look. There’s a vulture. It circles above them. Those huge wings. He looks at them. He is hungry. And that’s when you realize it. It’s waiting for them to die’.
By some miracle he swims to safety and eventually ends up in the German industrial town of Storkow, where he works as an Amazon delivery boy, locked into a heavy schedule in an unfamiliar environment.
Aboud, from Syria, survived a near drowning after the small boat he was on capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, but eventually made it to Germany, where he works as an Amazon delivery boy.
He says: ‘It’s not really how I imagined it. It is not actually a German city anymore. It’s packed with everyone. It’s full of Turks, it’s full of Poles, it’s full of Arabs. And it’s full of crime.
‘You can see that clearly at work. It’s the Germans at the top, you barely see them, they’re behind computers. Then the Western Europeans, those who think they are their equals. Then the Turks, they own so much here. Then the Eastern Europeans. Then the Asians. Then the refugees: Arabs, Africans, all at the bottom.
Author Ben Judah spent half a decade traveling to more than two dozen countries to write his book. The He reveals that Europe has been totally transformed – in which the continent fades away with the Middle East and Africa.
Judah’s message is as stark as it is clear: what Europe once was, it is no more.
We must heed his words.
This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now by Ben Judah is published by Picador and is available for £18.99 at Water stones And Amazon.