The small boats are relentless – coming almost daily. The threat of yet another civil war in the Conservative Party looms as Tory backbenchers want Rishi Sunak’s Bill to stem the tide of migrant boats radically toughened up.
And last week over three hundred desperate people seeking refuge died after an overcrowded boat sunk off the coast of Greece.
The tragedies keep coming. Migration numbers are at their highest ever, and those who voted for Brexit demand answers. It is a Europe strafed by migration, climate change, technology and war.
An explosive and important new book, This is Europe, by the author and journalist Ben Judah, shows us how the continent is being remade by two great quests for freedom: Migrants from the global south coming in search of a better life, and those from the east, fleeing from war.
It details the human realities of the phenomenon once these migrants arrive in their new lands and how they are forced to adapt to make ends meet through the stories of 23 characters across 23 chapters.
Through these brilliantly vivid descriptions and personal interviews, Judah creates a tale of life on the margins of our societies, from the Amazon worker and from Syria to the Latvian Webcam girl.
In his 20s, Ibrahim fled war-torn Syria as a teen and made his way to Germany via a long car journey, with the help of fake passports. He had big dreams of being an actor, but after struggling to find work fell into a gap in the market for Arab porn stars. Pictures top left in traditional dress and top right and bottom in his new life as a porn star.
In his 20s, Ibrahim fled war-torn Syria as a teen and made his way to Germany via long car journeys with the help of fake passports.
He says: ‘It was expensive. I paid $4,000 just to get into Greece. I just drove straight to Greece with a fake passport, with my fingerprints and everything.’
He finally made it to Germany where he found himself at school in Cologne and the victim of vicious bullying. Judah writes: ‘They had him in classes, in a normal, everyday school, where they’d look at him because he couldn’t speak German, where they had everything, but they still made fun of him, laughing at his Arab accent. It made him feel so awful that even now, he didn’t even want to think about it’
Ibrahim had big dreams of being an actor, but after struggling to find work fell into a gap in the market for Arab porn stars.
Soon he was flown out to Prague for his first shoot but reveals he struggled to get hits on his videos, leading him to set up his own website which eventually allowed him to ‘make it big’.
But his career path was met with despair from his family, ‘you can’t do this, think of your family,” they message him.
‘What you are doing is disgusting. I’m ordering you to stop it now’.
And then there is the rage of the locals, ‘disgusting Arab. we will kill you’, they write.’
But Ibrahim says that he is sticking at it thanks to his bullies who instilled his need to stay in control and choose his own way, not, as he says, the ‘the kebab houses where he really belongs’.
Ionut, a Romanian truck driver who often drives with his girlfriend Cami (together top), says he sees too many bad apples giving hard-working Eastern Europeans like him a bad reputation. Ionut sleeps in his truck during his long hard shifts, bottom left, and shares a simple meal with a co-worker in the back of an empty truck
This Is Europe shows just how diverse migrants are from each other, not least in their views on migration. Ionut, a Romanian truck driver who works in England, says he sees too many bad apples giving hard-working Eastern Europeans like him a bad reputation.
He recalls being gassed unconscious while resting at a truck stop in France, which allowed thieves to empty his truck of its goods.
‘It was another immigrant-infested area,’ he says contemptuously. ‘Over the course of several years I’ve noticed the thieves are the transitional people. The immigrants. Natives don’t do this stuff in Britain or France, or at least in very small percentages. It’s the people from Africa, Afghanistan, Romania, Poland . . . people from those lands are the rogues,’ he adds.
His assessment is brutal: ‘This situation baffles me. The immigrants are taken in as the workforce, cared for by England and in return they do their best to up the crime rate! Is that how they repay the country for taking them in and offering them work and proper living conditions?’
But Ionut’s story is ultimately a tragedy. No matter how hard he works, he cannot seem to improve his lot. ‘I’m picking up more debt than I can learn’, he says forlornly.
Pictured is the dingy block of flats and tiny room in Latvia where Nora, 16, was forced to work as a cam girl to raise money to live in Italy where she had earned a college scholarship
Another shocking story is that of Nora, a 16-year-old girl from Latvia who takes up a job as a cam-girl to fund flights to Italy, where she has been awarded a scholarship for the United World Colleges campus.
The book details her shifts in the dingy apartment building that houses the dilapidated cam studio. Her drive to earn the money needed to travel to Italy is all that keeps her from walking out, as her clients spam her with messages calling her ‘a fat b****’ and threatening to “rape her and kill her”.
She spends the evenings crying in pursuit of this dream. The university’s assumption that Nora should be able to pay for her flights demonstrates the lack of opportunities available to those like her – who have the ability but not the means to better themselves.
Natasha and her husband took to the streets in her hometown of Homyel against Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. All they did was peacefully protest but in Belarus that is a criminal offence.
When her husband, German, is arrested and sent to prison, she is told her daughter will be next – a threat that sets off a chain of events that eventually sees her arriving, exhausted and dazed, as a refugee in Lithuania.
Pictured top: German before his arrest for protesting in Belarus. Pictured below: German with his daughter Natasha before their life was torn apart.
Then there is the story of Aboud from Syria, who endured a treacherous journey across the Med in a small boat, almost perishing on the way.
Judah recalls his near-drowning: ‘There are two guys next to him. He can hear them panicking. Talking to themselves. Are those prayers they are muttering? They are not all together any more.
‘Aboud, look. There’s a vulture. It’s circling over them. Those huge wings. He’s looking at them. He’s hungry. And that’s when you realise. It’s waiting for them to die’.
By some miracle, he swims to safety and finally ends up in the German industrial city of Storkow, working as an Amazon delivery driver, locked into a punishing schedule in unfamiliar surroundings.
Aboud, from Syria, survived a near drowning after the small boat he was on capsized in the Med, but eventually made it to Germany where he works as an Amazon delivery driver.
He says: ‘It’s not really like I imagined it. It’s not a German city, really, any more. It’s full of everyone. It’s full of Turks, it’s full of Poles, it’s full of Arabs. And it’s full of crime.
‘At work you can see it clearly. It’s the Germans at the top, you can barely see them, they’re behind computers. Then the Western Europeans, the ones who think they are their equals. Then the Turks, they own so much here. Then the Eastern Europeans. Then the Asians. Then the refugees: Arabs, Africans, all of them at the bottom.
Author Ben Judah spent half a decade travelling to over two dozen countries to write his book. The Europe he reveals is one totally transformed – in which the continent is blurring with the Middle East and Africa.
Judah’s message is as stark as it is clear: What Europe once was it no longer is.
We should heed his words.
This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now by Ben Judah is published by Picador and available for £18.99 at Waterstones and Amazon.
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