Each election the question of immigration plays a major role. Reactions swing from hysteric xenophobia to sentimental idealism and back again. Statistics are pushed in front of us either to press us into seeing immigrants as benefit thieves or as a critical part of our economic development. Other politicians then tell us that the statistics themselves are merely an estimation, a somewhat inaccurate guess and the immigration debate is once more plunged into a problematic mire of uncertainty and confusion.

The issue that appears to unite the majority of decision-makers across the political spectrum is that the problem regarding illegal immigrants, at any rate, must be tackled. Their image is at the pinnacle of the Daily Mail’s rants against those allegedly stealing our jobs, committing crimes and refusing to play any part in our society. They are our benefit carnivores, our good, hard-working average citizen’s economic ravagers – or so the rhetoric of the gutter press would have us believe. Due to the underground nature of their arrival, the number of illegal immigrants in Britain is uncertain and yet the British media insist on discussing them almost exclusively in numeric terms. Reduced to such parlance, “they” remain a statistic- and a vague, shadowy one at that.

Yet such people are not so far from us as the media’s cold, statistical language may wish to portray. Only ten minutes from the suburb where I live, on a nearby council estate in Croydon, lives the Madaki family[1] who has fled from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The entire extended family worked as drivers and bodyguards for president Mobutu Sese Seko. Overthrown in the First Congo War in 1997, Mobutu was forced into exile and all that had worked for him, in whatever capacity, were placed in mortal peril. The effect that these events had upon the family was detrimental. The mother of the family in question, Abeeda, who was at the time pregnant, was forced to leave her three eldest children with family members and flee on to a plane with her youngest child. She was given permission to remain here in the UK due to the threat of persecution at home. Soldiers shot two of her brothers in front of their wives and young children and then dragged the bodies away. Her uncle was also poisoned. All other male family members have either fled abroad or died violent deaths.

This happened over a decade ago, yet the threat for the family remains ever prevalent. The mother of Abeeda was, for example, believed to have been dead by family and close friends for over two years. She was in fact placed in Kinshasa Prison where she has been violently raped by military authorities.

The eldest son, now nineteen, has just been told by our courts that he cannot remain in the country. As he is over the age of eighteen, he has no right to remain here merely on the grounds that his entire family have been granted the status of official asylum seekers. The risk of persecution was not deemed credible despite the fact that he has spent the last decade of his life on the run. He is an “illegal immigrant”, his mother an “asylum seeker”; a categorisation that has split him from his family. I met with him in his mother’s house to hear his story.

On the 17th May 1997, LM, at the time aged just seven years old, returned home from St Augustin school in Kinshasa to discover his house destroyed and his mother, father and siblings fled. “The house was completely devastated. I was terrified as my school was far from where we lived. Nobody was in the house and so all I could do was hide. When my uncle arrived in search of family members, we had to flee because everybody knew that my family worked for the previous president and so we were in terrible danger.”

He described how he remained in Gemena, in the north of the country, until his uncle’s death when he was just thirteen. With still no idea of his family’s whereabouts, he then worked cleaning cars with a twenty-six year old man who took pity on his situation. “We would ask that customers leave the cars over night so that we could use them to sleep in, having no fixed lodging ourselves,” he explained. He would work to save money and then travel as far as he could, desperate to find his family, whom he discovered had managed to get to Europe. When I asked him how he found out this information, he explained that refugee communities would often hear and remember family names. It was purely through word of mouth that a pastor at a local church was able to track down his mother who had sought asylum in the UK. On hearing this news, LM would then work to save money and travel as far as the money would allow him.

The journey he took was both long and at times physically straining. He spent four months in the Sahara desert trying to get to Morocco, the immigration hotspot for those trying to get from Africa to Europe. He described the journey he took with an elderly lady and an eleven-year old girl as “some of the most miserable days of my life”. In Morocco itself he was faced with unashamed racism. He was pelted with stones by locals and called an “aâzi”, which, vaguely translated, means “dirty black Negro”. “Some people were good to me, some were not,” he stated. Eventually he worked his way through to Paris where he managed to attain a forged passport to use on the coach from Galleini to London Victoria. He told me of the joy of meeting his mother after eleven years, how she fainted, how he cried.

His answers were always made patiently and he happily recounted details when I asked. There was nothing particularly suspicious about his manner. He was always eager to explain if I didn’t understand a particular point. And yet despite his frank sincerity, despite his easy mannerisms, much of the story was confused. The details themselves did not always match those he had told close friends of the family and even the authorities here. He told them, on the one hand, that he arrived in Heathrow. He told me, on the other, that he travelled from the Congo to Britain without taking one plane. Throughout the hour-long interview, the phrase that repeatedly came up was: “Where I am from is not like in England…” and the labyrinthine story itself provoked far more questions than it was feasible for me to ask in just one hour.

The fact, for example, that LM does not know his official birth date, considered in our state-bureaucracy as a rather basic point of information, has affected his treatment here; he was accused of consciously trying to deceive the police. However, record keeping is not as advanced in parts of Africa as it can be in urbanised Western cultures. It is not unusual to be told only the season, or even the year of their birthday, if that. Various parts of Africa do not use the same calendar that we do, often calculating in terms of ancestral lineages rather than by the birth of Christ. Similarly, the conflicting accounts regarding how he came to Britain may be made a little clearer by an understanding of our own system; we have prescribed a story that his must fit if he wishes to remain. He knew that there is a general “first country of asylum” principle utilised in the EU. Yet he was not only travelling to safety, but also understandably to be with the family, already in the UK, who he had lost for twelve years.  Many fleeing their country will have also undergone psychologically damaging experiences that may cause them to confuse events. Equally, those, like LM, whose lives have been torn by the effect of war, political strife and persecution are used to treating authorities as the enemy, as people who threaten even mortal danger to both their own persons and those they love. There may therefore be a reason for their defensiveness and their decision to obscure the facts.

The issues are not simplistic because they are about people and people rarely slot into impersonal systems that atomise and classify. The method of aggressive, intimidating grilling LM described to me that police here executed seems a somewhat inadequate method for finding his story out. A 19-year-old son (separated from his family at the age of eight) might want to live with his family just as much as an 18 year old, that would be granted permission to stay. I understand that no system will be perfect but surely we need to hear and evaluate their stories and not merely count heads on paper.

[1] To protect the privacy of the family all names have been changed.