You don’t want to do all these dodgy things and trick the country but you have to… £5000 debt in Colombia is a lot of money.” His Spanish passport soon expired and Esteban decided to marry his girlfriend to gain citizenship. “I had said I would never marry for papers but I couldn’t go back to Colombia empty handed, not after all this... We went to Colombia and got married, but I knew I was staying with her for the papers. When we returned to the UK I was not happy. I was a legal now but made less than as an illegal immigrant. I was married but not with the person I love. I just couldn’t find myself. Sometimes I thought, was it really all worth it?” Having dealt with over 30 deportation cases in his many years as an immigration officer, Marcus has seen undocumented migration from the other side of the supposed fence. He revealed that, contrary to what we might expect, most undocumented migrants are not deported following home office background checks. It is usually the people they know who report them, often family or close friends on whom the migrants have become dependent on and who cannot afford to support them anymore. But an identification of an irregular migrant can become a long process. Immigration cases have strict limitations and jurisdiction. There must first be substantial and credible physical evidence of illegal employment and then further investigations are undertaken when new evidence comes to light. Once discovered by the authorities irregular migrants often reach to extreme methods in desperate attempts to prevent their deportation. “They often commit some kind of harm to themselves, like breaking their arm, or their leg.” Marcus reveals, ‘Hospitalization is one way to prolong the stay in the country as they have to be transported in good health condition. If successful, they are then returned to their holding site. All this, of course, at the taxpayer’s expense.’
Dealing with asylum requests can take a significant amount of time. “Some are held for a very long time; sometimes as much as five years.” Marcus explains, “The more lies they tell, the more investigations we have to undertake. It is not always easy to close a case because you are ultimately making a decision about someone else’s life.” Marcus has encountered many difficult decisions within his line of work; “You have to face the fact that whatever you are doing is what you are getting paid for, I know it is nasty to say, but that is the job I have to do. There are mixed feelings; there was once a case of a family where a father was crying out just to take him back to his country, leaving his kids in the UK. He was begging me to let them stay because they were born in this country, but because he is an illegal they had to go back with him.” During his course as an irregular migrant Esteban was punished by the authorities not only for unauthorized crossing of the borders but also indirectly for corruption taking place in Venezuela, for inability of UK authorities to successfully regulate working conditions and even for failure of the same authorities to deliver a fair trial. Marcus’ narrative tells us that this is hardly a unique case. Can we say that justice is provided? Who is to blame for an illegal entry? The traveler or the guide? Are the right people being prosecuted? In truth the concept of illegal migration and the migrants themselves feed a machinery of political interests and rhetoric combined with a great economic interest which parasites on the status of undocumented migrants who exist outside the law and are therefore ridded of their rights as humans. This indicates that things are not as simple. There is a rather complex system behind the dehumanisation and criminalisation of undocumented migrants and therefor a pressing need to rethink the current migration discourse. Interviews were conducted with anonymous participants on the 28th November 2013 Author: Melissa Caprini Course: 3rd Year BA International Relations and Spanish
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