Irene

Irene comes from an Eastern European country which used to be part of the Soviet Bloc. She is a failed asylum seeker but came to the UK at a time when she was able to get a work permit. She now does some work from home, although she has been told that her work permit could be withdrawn at any time.

Irene has a Jewish father and a Russian mother. The anti-semitism in the Eastern European country where she lived drove her family to move to Israel in the early 90s. In Israel they were persecuted and discriminated against - they were not considered to be truly Jewish, because Irene's mother was not Jewish, only her father. When asked what form the persecution took her eyes filled with tears and she could not tell me, so we moved on.

Irene and her (then) 14-year-old child came to the UK in 2001 to escape this persecution. They came to Britain because Irene felt remembered the country fondly from a visit she had made here as a child, and felt familiar with British culture having read Winnie-the Pooh, Dickens and Thackeray as she was growing up.

In her country of origin, Irene was a journalist - a political analyst. Two politicians who she knew well and respected for being good men were murdered. Israeli politics also frustrated her - Israeli politicians were "not good". British politicians, she felt, were different.

Now, Irene thinks that she saw things through "rose-tinted glasses". She feels that as a political analyst, she was stupid to expect British politicians to be any different from those she had previously encountered. She still has good feelings about Britain, but she has bad feelings about "officials".

Irene lives in a state of constant insecurity - she has no life, no rights and no future. She is particularly worried about her child's future: now twenty years old, he has no right to the higher education he dreams of, and is currently working illegally. Irene fears that if they were forced to return to Israel, her child would be imprisoned as a deserter from conscription. She is also anxious about her elderly parents - who came to the UK in 2004 and whose asylum claims have also failed. She feels that they would be utterly unable to cope if they were deported - the effect on their already frail state of health would be catastrophic.

To be regularised, Irene says, would be "to feel like a human being again instead of a non-person, and to rejoin the human race." She longs for the day when she and her family can feel secure, free from the fear of the Home Office and the "knock on the door". She wants to have basic rights - to travel, to work, to have a safe future. Most of all she wants a secure future for her child: "I want my child to have a place in society, not to have to live in the shadows."

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