I remember when I first started volunteering with Citizens Advice a few years ago a lot of the clients I was seeing were asylum seekers or refugees from places in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. By enlarge they didn’t have much in the way of spoken English and they were generally there for assistance in one way or another with claiming benefits. Despite my liberal sensibilities I would often find myself becoming impatient with them, presumably due to some sub conscious prejudice perhaps created by the media I consumed or the popular opinion I absorbed. Deep down I think I envisioned these people and their families stepping off an aeroplane in search of easy living… Eventually I notched this down to ignorance and decided to start engaging with the clients a little more and finding out how they got to the UK and why they were here. What I started to hear astounded me. Stories of arduous journeys at the hands of opportunistic criminal gangs. Eritrean people, who had fled with young families, and traversed the Sahara. Syrians who were doctors and accountants in their own country, cast out by conflict and now having to answer to an unsympathetic Job Centre employee as to why they couldn’t find work in take-aways and car washes. I sat with an Iranian man who wanted to claim a sickness benefit due to leg and back pain and problems with anxiety, eventually in broken English he told me how he had sustained his injuries whilst strapped to a torture rack… I find the decision not to help some of the most vulnerable people on earth shameful. theguardian/commentisfree/2014/oct/28/britain-refusal-help-migrants-inhumanity
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 19:20:04 +0000
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