Yasmin

Yasmin is a 33-year-old Israeli Palestinian with brown eyes and a winning smile. She is trained in law, speaks excellent English with barely an accent, and has worked in a host of skilled jobs since 2000.

Her story reveals like no other how, without a change in the law to allow for an amnesty, thousands of people in the UK are condemned to a dehumanising limbo: unable to leave, and unable to stay with dignity. It is a situation which has reduced a smart, optimistic young woman to a state of fear, anxiety and self-doubt.

Yasmin studied law at a British university before returning to her Arab-speaking town in Israel. During the second intifadah she was politically active, protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It made her a target, along with her family and friends, for Israeli snipers. Rather than face more bullets or years of imprisonment in Israeli jails, she came to London on a tourist visa to stay with friends. After taking her passport, the Immigration Service asked her to come back in a week.

“I panicked,” she said. “I was scared they would send me back to Israel to face imprisonment.”

She sought a lawyer, who advised her to seek asylum. During 2001, she was bounced between various offices. Later that year, having failed to persuade the Home Office that she faced persecution if she went back, she was refused asylum.

In 2002, she was unable to persuade a lawyer to take her case. In 2004, she found one who would – but was rejected again. In 2005, the Home Office asked to see her, and she assumed she would be deported. She said her goodbyes to her friends, and braced herself for what was to come. But instead of being deported she was issued with a form of identity card that identified her as an asylum applicant.

In 2006, by now desperate to have some resolution of her future, and tired of depending on the charity of friends, she found another lawyer, who told her she had two choices: to “disappear” or to contact the IOM, a Home Office-funded body which enables repatriation. Yasmin did not want to “disappear”; she hates the idea of living beyond the law.

So she left the IOM two messages which said, in effect, “If you want to deport me, you can.” Her lawyer also wrote a letter with the same message. Nobody contacted her. She didn’t insist. “I wasn’t going to beg them to put me in prison,” she says.

Her passport, which the Home Office took from her, has since expired. Even if she wanted to go back – which she doesn’t – she would be unable to, because she has no valid travel documents. If she presented herself to the Israeli authorities, it would be tantamount to inviting them to imprison her. She is in limbo, because the alternatives to limbo seem so much worse.

Yasmin has good friends in England – English people, Europeans as well as Palestinians. Without them, she would have been on the street. But she has also worked.

She worked, for example, in a coffee shop, where she was paid about £4 an hour – well under the minimum wage. When, after three months, she got flu for two days, she was fired.

“The woman told me I wasn’t fit enough to do the job, which was ridiculous. The fact is, she had other illegal migrants wanting work who were willing to take my place.”      

She then worked in a sales department for a small firm who knew her situation and wanted to help her. But after six months they told her they could no longer afford her. She was let go without severance pay.

She began working as a researcher in a company. She worked there for two years, and was very good at it. But one day in 2003 she was called into her boss’s office and asked for her papers. They sympathised, but said it was too risky to keep her on.

She had been renting a small flat, which she had to give up. After three months, she found another admin/sales job, where she worked for two years. But she was paid far less than everyone else, despite being the most senior in the department. She knew she was being exploited because of her situation. When she asked for more, she was refused.

“I left that job,” she says. “Maybe it was stupid of me, but I couldn’t take the lack of dignity any more.”

Since then, she has had the odd freelance job, and gives the odd Arabic class. She does not want to buy an identity on the black market, as so many irregular migrants are forced to do. She would be too afraid, she says. It is not in her nature to resort to subterfuge.
She never earns enough to rent a room, and since November last year moves around from friend to friend.

“I spend three or four days in each place. I keep moving because I don’t want to be a burden,” she says. “Most of my friends live in small places, and I don’t want to get in the way for too long.”

There are many days when she wakes up not knowing where she is – or even who she is. The nights are long, and she has difficulty sleeping. She has nightmares about going back and being arrested.

“I dream of a miracle,” she says. “Some way I can be legal, have an identity again. I want to be like any other human being: to work, to struggle, to have a relationship, start a family. But there are days when I am pessimistic. I can’t see it happening.”

Friends tell her that a man who loved her would not worry about her situation. But Yasmin laughs.

“Would anyone want to fall in love with a woman who moves around every few days, and who could be deported at any time?”

If she sticks it out for another four years, she would be automatically entitled to citizenship. But the thought of living like this for another four years is unthinkable to her.

“It’s the lack of stability, the lack of hope,” she says, crying a little. “It’s the fact of being away from my family – the thought of what I am putting them through. They worry about me.”

Yasmin has grown stronger through it all. She is agnostic, but the idea of God is strong to her. She knows she is loved by her friends – it is enough to keep her going, despite the constant instability and lack of hope. She is grateful not to be on the street. She knows it’s worse for many other people.

But she is living on the edge of her nerves, a young woman full of talent and energy reduced to a vagrant, living from day to day.

 “I’d like to put my head on my pillow one day,” she says, “and finally have some peace of mind.”

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