Captured by : PG1. LEAD_3
How has immigration affected Europe?
Mass immigration is one of core features of the 21st century and the politics of mass migration will dominate the first few decades of the century. In Europe you have historically gigantic levels of immigration on a scale for Britain, France and other countries, historically unprecedented since the Dark Ages and the fall of the Roman Empire. The population is agitated and concerned that this rapid pace of ethnic change will result in the unravelling of what they feel is their traditional way of life and their communities, even though overwhelmingly, Europeans who vote for right wing and populist parties will be adamant that they are not racist and that they understand that immigration does have benefits. They just think that it’s too much too fast.
England has been a country that has benefited from immigration?
I don’t think of immigration as good or bad. The migration of a Russian oligarch to London is fundamentally different from the migration of a Roma beggar. People experience immigration in very different ways. If you look at the most pro-EU place in the country before the referendum which was in North London, there the wealthy population will experience immigration as restaurants, chefs, as cheap nannies from Spain. If you go to the most Europhobic location in the UK, which was a district in East London around Rumford, they experience immigration as Romanian and East Europeans touting for work, not doing construction work with requisites or insurance, as intense pressure on public services, as you working in a supermarket and everyone around you speaking Polish and cutting you out. The British experience it very differently depending on their social class.
Where does This is London come in? These are the stories of immigrants…
I lived and worked in Russia and travelled across Siberia meeting corrupt ministers, Soviet geologists marooned in the Tigre, I was meeting brigands, Caucasian warlords and oligarchs. As I crisscrossed Russian terrain, I realized that being a foreign correspondent was also a literary style and when I moved back to Britain I realized that we don’t look at our country that way. As I looked around I realized that London was being transformed by migrant labour and migrant wealth. I didn’t recognise the city of my childhood. I didn’t know what was in their heads or what they did. So I started to write a book, about the arc of life, so each chapter is a story where I try to get into the head of a migrant, with interviews and profiles. I spent weeks with them or I worked and lived with them, I joined a Roma begging gang… The intention was to show London through their eyes. It’s not about the politics of migration.
Was there any experience that stayed with you, was there something poignant that maybe made you look at something or someone in a different way?
The bit that stays with me the longest was the bit that was the most difficult, which was the embedded and undercover reporting. Sleeping rough on the streets of London and just realizing that all of my perceptions are nourished by sleep, food, coffee, comfort. Living on the street you start struggling, sleeping on a cardboard box and your perceptions just begin to collapse and how your body becomes kind of disfigured by it and how the logic of desperation takes over very quickly.
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To know more about Ben Judah’s journey, watch this short film Homeless and Hungry that he created - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k-7_kf3Fus
