Strangers into Citizens

NICK

“ You might say I came from little London to big London,” Nick laughs, sitting back in a chair in the priest’s house next to the church where he attends Mass each week in Portuguese. He comes from a town in Brazil which means “little London”.

It’s a romantic story.

He was just 18 and his girlfriend Maria 16 when she had what he calls this “crazy dream” about coming to Britain.

He sold CDs, she sold shoes. They weren’t going anywhere, and they wanted a better future.

They borrowed money for the air fare and flew to a place in Europe from which they came to London. Nick prefers not to reveal the place.
It was arranged by a friend, who pointed them in the direction of a man in London who put them up and got Nick a job washing dishes - £100 a week for an eight-hour day.
Maria wasn’t working and the man charged £50 a week each for their room. It was tough. They lived hand to mouth like that for four months.

Then the restaurant let him go. No money, no severance pay. Nick and Maria were on the streets for three days.

“We just kept walking,” he says, shuddering at the memory.

Nick took a second job with long hours (8am to 6pm) at another restaurant, which at least paid the minimum wage. Maria went to work in a cake factory. No papers were asked for, and they got the money paid by cheque into their bank account.

But after some months their employers started to tighten up. Nick went to buy false European passports for each of them, spending everything he had saved and using borrowed money on top to buy two passports costing £1500 each.

“It cost a lot more then,” he says. “Now there are so many being sold you just pay £300.”

The passport was good enough for Maria to go back to Brazil and return. Nick decided to do the same.

But at Lisbon airport they spotted that the passport was dodgy. Nick faced arrest but the official let him through. “He told me I should go back home and have a long think about my life,” Nick remembers.

In 2003 he came back via the original route they had first used. He returned to the restaurant. His boss knew now that Nick was illegal, but let him stay.
“ He told me I was a hard worker and they needed me,” Nick says.

After a while he left to work packing foods for restaurant suppliers. He showed his P45 and gave his bank account details. He was paid £6 an hour, and worked there for more than three years. By the end of his time there he was an operational manager, earning £23,000 p.a. He moved onto another job for a few months, on a higher salary, and then onto his present job, where he works as a business consultant on a respectable salary.

Nick is proud at his achievement. “Between how I started and where I am now – it’s fabulous,” he says, adding: “A lot of illegal people you think you have to stick to cleaning jobs, but it’s not true. If you work hard you can end up in good jobs.”

Maria used to be scared of being found out. Nick has learned to live with the fear and conquer it. (They are no longer together: Maria has gone back to Brazil.)
“ It’s important not to be afraid. If you act afraid, then you draw attention. For me it’s become natural. Why should I be scared? I’m not a criminal.”

But his illegal status is always at the back of his mind, he concedes. And he is always coming up against the restrictions his status places on him, like a man who keeps banging into a glass door he has not seen.

“Sometimes I think, ‘great!’ I could go here or there, do this or that. But then I remember I can’t. I remember that I’m illegal, and that I don’t have the right to be here.”

He misses his family, which he hasn’t seen for more than three years. “Now they are saying I have to come back. They don’t think it’s worth it – all the uncertainty and risk of being found out.”

But he isn’t going back. In England now he has a whole new life: his home, his friends, his job – and the Brazilian Catholic Church in East London where he is active.

He likes London. “I like the life, the place, I’ve got everything I need. There’s nothing for me back home. This is my city. It’s my home now.”

The hardest thing about illegal, he says, is “being nobody”.

“I work and pay taxes like anybody else,” he says, “but unlike anybody else the government doesn’t recognise me. It’s like I don’t exist.”

He has no GP. “I don’t get sick,” he says. “If I do, I go to A & E”.

He dreams of being a citizen.

“I see my life here. I want to buy a house here. I want freedom.”

Freedom? What does he mean by that?
Nick struggles to name it - that sense of coming out of the shadows. He looks for the words as a person looks for a key.

“ It’s a sense of peace,” he says at last. “I want to be normal, to be myself.”