On a patch of higher ground in Burgess Park, south London, Abdul points at the building he used to work in. Owned by the State of Qatar, the Shard thrusts greedily upward, master of all it surveys. “I was working as a cleaner, in different places,” Abdul says. “In like, government offices. I was [also] working in the Shard, near London Bridge. It was from midnight till seven in the morning. At night, there was no one inside really. Just some cleaners. Most of the staff, they come in the morning, when we get off.”
Abdul was born in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, and came to the UK as an asylum seeker, fleeing an ongoing conflict that has shaped life in his country since 1991. He is a Somali citizen, but he holds a Yemeni passport, and so the UK Home Office told him he couldn’t seek asylum from Somalia. In court in 2017, the British government department said they would deport Abdul to Yemen. Abdul recalls that the judge said: “I know what is happening in Yemen. Yemen is not safe. War has already started there.”
At this point, a misunderstanding typical of the highly bureaucratised, opaque British immigration system seems to have occurred. Abdul believed he had been given ten years leave to remain in the UK. A couple of weeks later, a biometric card arrived. It needed to be renewed every two and a half years – that renewal would cost Abdul upwards of £2,000. He had been left with no recourse to public funding (NRPF), and the work he was doing as a cleaner or as a kitchen hand in a “big restaurant near Hyde Park Corner” all paid minimum wage.
Without the money to renew his card, the Home Office stripped Abdul of his status. “I lost my job. I lost everything. I was happy in my job,” he says. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Unable to work and unable to claim benefits, Abdul was homeless and began having to survive on tiny cash grants from charities – £40 here and there. He has a couple of friends who will let him sleep in their kitchen if he pays them. In November last year, his renewal fee was waived and his immigration status was restored, but the pandemic has laid waste to his previous jobs, and so his situation remains dire.
Abdul is one of a number of London-based migrants who have collaborated in the making of the film ‘H is for Hostile Environment’, directed by the artist Edwin Mingard and the historian Keren Weitzberg. The film is being shown as part of the Trellis festival at University College London on the evening of Friday 16 April.
Another of the film’s collaborators, Usman, told openJustice that after being put on a five-year track to citizenship, he was able to raise money to start a social enterprise that would train refugees to become baristas. It would also establish a space in which music concerts and comedy nights could be put on, with the hope of using the arts to “break the narratives in society around refugees”. The pandemic has put paid to this project for now, and Usman has only just managed to avoid the fate of Abdul by taking odd jobs and selling coffee beans online.
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Oscar Rickett | Radio Free (2021-04-15T09:33:59+00:00) ‘I lost everything’: COVID-19 and the UK’s Hostile Environment policy. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/15/i-lost-everything-covid-19-and-the-uks-hostile-environment-policy/
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