The front desk call out a name, ‘Mohammed Ahmed!’ Four men – or boys as they claimed to be – arrive at the glass window ready for Asda food gift cards and a cash subsistence payment. It’s a small job to find the real Mr Ahmed – the one whose face matches the ID card on file – who eventually gets the payment as the others sit down frustrated.
The route has changed, but Britain has don’t nothing to reduce the incentives. Again the merry-go-round of casual work is the big draw
It’s 2003, in a converted, decaying school building in Sycamore Road, Aston, barely a mile from Villa Park stadium, I am working in my first full-time job, as a lowest rung admin answering calls and doing the paperwork for payments for Birmingham Social Services in a team which puts recently arrived unaccompanied minors into homes across the city.
The issues then are exactly the same now – an unending flow of humanity with no place to put them. The air is thick with sweat and the smell of damp clothes, as an embattled security guard tries to corral these restless men into the few chairs.
As claimants are all here on the proviso they are under 18. Staff would play ‘Guess the age’ with their ID cards. ‘How old is this guy meant to be?’ you might get asked. ‘Thirty two?’ ‘No. Fifteen.’
In this pre-digital, paper document world – because of poor literacy – arrivals could scribble an ‘X’ on the form, take the benefits and leave. This meant you might give out dozens of payments simply to a Mr X.
To an 19-year-old admin worker, the manilla case files made compelling, if incomplete reading. ‘Vladimir has no documents because he was fleeing enemy forces in Albania,’ or ‘Mustafa has no family. He is from Sudan.’
Many of these folders would remain flimsy as huge numbers simply vanished. This was not a Home Office department and had no power to deport – regardless of what staff thought – only to facilitate asylum seekers’ lives while they were here.
The less information each asylum claimant submitted, the more likely they would be allowed to remain by the Home Office. In order to get hired for the job, I had to provide proof of ID, bank statement, pass a CRB check and also supply a reference. Yet, in order to get paid on the other side of the glass, saying you were an asylum-seeking child was enough.
Everything was upside-down. When one lie was exposed, another was laid in its place. A man from Jamaica was able to claim he needed asylum because, as a homosexual, he was vulnerable to homophobic abuse back home. He eventually, we learned, secured his permanent UK status by getting a woman pregnant.
The Home Office would grant leave to remain if the candidate could ‘demonstrate knowledge of war or torture in a foreign country.’ But there’s two types of people who would have knowledge of war and torture – those running from the gun and those holding it. It wasn’t always clear if people were escaping persecution or prosecution. Monday morning would often bring calls from the police enquiring about the whereabouts of different claimants. One might be wanted in suspicion of hitting a child on a pedestrian crossing – a double foul because, as a penniless unaccompanied minor, none were supposed to be able to drive or afford a car.
In 2015, as a journalist, I saw the other side of the queue. I visited the Calais migrant jungle for the first time and subsequently went back again a year later. The small flow of desperate cases was now a flood.
Barely two hours from King’s Cross station – hidden under the armpit of a motorway fly over, ‘The Jungle’ – subsequently removed in October 2016, but steadily growing back again today – was a grim, rubbish-strewn site of 4,000 people, almost all young men. A sort of desperate Glastonbury of rows of tents and mud, with miserable groups hunched among bramble bushes. Each nation was signposted by flags and their own communities – Sudanese in a series of tents kicking a ball around, neighbours to Afghans and Pakistanis, united by their mutual love of cricket. Alongside familiar conflict flashpoints there were also Kuwaitis – in an abandoned agricultural shed – and flags for Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal. What war were they escaping from?
Hundreds of men stand in their pants queuing to use the camp’s single, overworked cold tap, or queuing for their only meal to be dished out at 5 p.m. by a soup kitchen. Many then – as they are now – are eldest sons from patriarchal societies. Their family go all in to send them here and they then have to say they are a success, even if that really means sweeping a factory floor. This lie of wealth is then told around tiny villages in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and more sons are sent.
Frustrated by the fences, they would block the motorway heading to the Channel Tunnel in a human chain, causing riot police to try and force them back with tear gas and shields. Against the soundtrack of blaring car horns, the line yelled, ‘We are human! We are not animals!’ Homemade boards mocked, ‘Britain, did your mother not teach you to share?’
One of the saddest sights was the waste of time and potential. Ahmed, 22, from Kabul, spent two months trying to smuggle himself into the UK, but – having failed – created an enterprise running the site’s ramshackle convenience stall, stocking basics like pasta, rice and soap he’d buy from a Lidl supermarket in nearby Cochelles, wheeling them back three miles in a shopping trolley along the hard shoulder.
He would sell his own cigarettes from a handmade rolling machine – 15 cents a fag – but his biggest seller was Monster energy drink, rocket fuel to propel the migrants to the lorries or to the sea. This enterprising young man had dreams. ‘I’d like my job to be in a chicken shop. A KFC. Some restaurant,’ he said.
I sat in a lorry with Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, who had 10,000 lorry drivers go through Calais each year. As now, with dinghies, the migrants had a sophisticated choreography to break into Britain at exactly the right moment. They would use mobiles on the edge of the perimeter tunnel to hit lorries at the exact moment the Gendarmes left. The plan being to get into a vehicle which had already gone through passport control.
Burnett told me of one driver, ex-army, who was threatened at gunpoint. ‘The migrants know the drivers don’t want to hit them so they will run on to the motorway and the drivers are forced to stop. Other drivers opened their trucks to find their loads – containers carrying £250,000 of designer clothes –entirely written off because of soilage. ‘The migrants are in there for days sometimes so you can imagine how much bodily fluid there can be,’ said Burnett.
The route has changed, but Britain has don’t nothing to reduce the incentives. Again the merry-go-round of casual work is the big draw.
Britain has an enormous shadow economy that has no barrier to entry. In 2003 we’d hear asylum seekers would illegally work in factories or building sites, in 2025 it is Deliveroo and Uber driving. While not luxuriously paid, when the UK taxpayer covers all your basic subsistence, anything you earn is cash in hand.
There are also pulls that the UK cannot remove. The immeasurable success of English language media and alongside it – the Premier League. The Premier League has the same pull that Hollywood had 70 years ago. I lost count of the number of young men who – with no familiarity of other places in Europe – had picked England (never Scotland or Wales) purely because it was where Chelsea or Manchester United played. They’d show me giant murals in their hometowns of Wayne Rooney or Cesc Fabregas.
The final issue alongside that is social media. Every corner of the world has mobile phones and social media, all creating a drip feed of UK culture – a glamorous social media view of real people’s lives watched through a flattering filter. Twice I heard an Afghan migrant say they wanted ‘an English girlfriend.’ When pressed they just burst into fits of giggles. Did they think all British women looked like pop stars, influencers actresses they’d seen on screen, or was it something darker? It did occur to me that most online pornography is English speaking.
In Calais, I saw two women in the camp. Amara from Eritrea, was helping her brother Filimon around the site, who had broken his leg climbing a fence. At 1 a.m., on the long night walk between the camp and the entrance to the Tunnel where migrants would try to get into Britain, was a Syrian woman – hobbling along and eight months pregnant. She was scrambling under a metal fence to try and get into a lorry – ‘any lorry’, she said – in order to reach her husband, already in the UK and working.
Since 2018, more than 170,000 men have crossed the Channel in small boats – more than the number of people in the British army. Around 95 per cent apply for asylum. Between 2019 and 2029, the UK is projected to spend £15.3 billion housing asylum seekers, triple the amount the Conservative government predicted in 2019. Over £40 million a year will be spent on legal aid arguing these cases, often based on little paperwork or hard proof.
In 20 years, the UK has done nothing to stem this tide. When migrants arrive, no blocks are put on cash-in-hand work; little paperwork is ever asked for; no liars or criminals are turned away when discovered and the legal system performs gymnastics to keep them here.
Comments