Immigration – in the UK and elsewhere – is a world with two parallel realities, and the difference is having a face or not having one. Reality one: Sir Mo Farah, one of the best British athletes in history, has just revealed that he came to the country as a child under a false identity, a victim of child trafficking, and obtained British nationality in a technically fraudulent way.
Reality two: foreigners without faces and without identity that governments unceremoniously deport to the applause of voters, those who are crushed to death on the Melilla fence after an “admirable operation” by the police, those who spend years in death camps internment that are prisons, those who perish in the North American desert looking for the American dream…
“I’ve been very lucky,” admits Farah, knighted by the queen in 2017. And so lucky, he was. First, because he managed to escape the exploitation for which he had been brought to Britain. Second, because his athletic skills (four Olympic gold medals) made him a celebrity. And third, because thanks to that, the Ministry of the Interior has ruled out deporting him, even though he obtained a passport under a name that was not really his. Others do not have the same fate, not even remotely.
While they applaud him for “coming out of the closet”, the Tory leaders are in favor of sending political asylum seekers to Rwanda (a country of weak democratic quality that violates human rights), either out of conviction or because if they said otherwise they would not have no chance of winning. 75% of Conservative voters agree with this, “because there is no place for everyone here, they dilute British identity and create pressure on social services.”
“Would the voters –here, in Kansas City and Seville– say the same if all those who try to jump the valleys, cross the rivers and deserts or cross the Mediterranean and the English Channel in a boat, were famous knights and athletes? wonders Margaret Finney, an immigration attorney. Of course not”. But behind each story there is a drama not very different, and usually much worse, than that of the Olympic champion of the five thousand and ten thousand meters.
Farah, who was called Hussein Abdi Kahin, was born in Somaliland (which declared its independence in 1991 but is not internationally recognized as a country), and at the age of four he lost his father to the civil war. The mother sent him to neighboring Djibouti, where he had relatives, assuming they would take care of him. One day, a woman he had never met before showed up at her uncle’s house to take him with her to England. “I was a nine-year-old boy – she says – and the idea of ??traveling by plane seemed fascinating to me”.
But things were not as promised. After entering the country with documents in the name of Mohammed Farah, he was taken to a house in the London neighborhood of Hounslow, and the first thing his new family did was to tear up all the papers and addresses he had, and put him to work without pay, cooking, cleaning, feeding and putting the children to sleep. For three years he did not go to school and was a virtual prisoner.
When he turned 12, and for fear of what the neighbors would say, his captors sent him to school even though he barely knew English. He found his salvation in athletics and in a teacher he trusted, he told him his story and did the paperwork for him to obtain British nationality as a Somali refugee named Mohammed Farah (the athlete, until now and for fear of reprisals, had always told that he arrived as a child to join his parents, who were already in England). “I am not who you think I am,” he says in the documentary.
Only yesterday, in the heat of the heat wave, several small boats with immigrants reached the Kent coast after crossing the English Channel (there are more than ten thousand so far this year), and millions of Britons – not only Conservatives but also Labor – they put the cry in the sky. “We should do something”.
Farah, married to an Englishwoman and father of four children, is a much-loved character, whose gesture of placing his hands on his shoulders in the shape of an m became a symbol of the 2012 Games. All politicians (including candidates Tory leadership) have sympathized with him as a victim of slavery and child trafficking, and fully understand the reasons why he obtained citizenship under a false name and has kept it a secret all this time. He is a man with a face.
But in the parallel reality, the official policy of the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, (and the Labor Party is not far behind) is still “to create a climate hostile to immigration”, whether it is the Poles who work of pallets, the Romanians who act as babysitters or the Sudanese, Afghans and Iraqis who cross the canal in small boats, precisely with the argument (also used by Pedro Sánchez) that making things difficult for them is the way to combat the mafias that they explode.
The British Government, like others, does not hesitate to deport those who have spent years and spent their savings fleeing political persecution or misery, who are threatened with death or have been raped (and sometimes, like the Jamaicans, who are taken decades in the country and arrived when they were citizens of the empire and were not asked for a passport). “Their problem – affirms attorney Finney – is that they have no name or face. They are just a number.”
