Post by Focus on Feb 16, 2013 11:54:04 GMT
Lounging on the steps of a crumbling Soviet-era apartment block on the outskirts of Romania’s most notorious slum, Iordan Rupa is drinking apple brandy and waiting for his mobile phone to ring.
Pulling a woollen hat tightly over his ears, he gestures at the filthy streets, filled with packs of stray dogs, mountains of rubble and litter, potholes, and the occasional burnt-out car.
‘Look at this place,’ he says. ‘There is nothing for us here. No jobs, no money. But if God is willing, this telephone will soon bring the chance of a better life.’
Homeless Romanian Gypsies living in Ferentari, the poorest part of Bucharest. They intend to come to the UK to find work
Roughly 1,600 miles away, in Dalston, North-East London, his uncle, Petru, is at this moment supposed to be visiting a branch of the money-wiring company Western Union.
Petru has promised to send him enough cash to buy a one-way coach ticket from central Bucharest, just a short drive from Ferentari where Iordan lives, to the UK. He’s due to call once the transaction has been completed.
‘When the money arrives, I start packing,’ says Iordan, his breath freezing in the winter air. ‘I have a last weekend with my wife and children then I leave for London.’
His first stop, after disembarking at Victoria Coach Station, will be a distribution centre for The Big Issue. He plans to register as one of the homeless magazine’s sellers, before finding a pitch on the streets of the capital.
Under a loophole in EU immigration rules, Big Issue sellers can claim ‘self-employed status’, thereby gaining a National Insurance number and, with it, an instant legal foothold in the British labour market.
The Gypsies live in a makeshift shelter underneath a hot water pipe which helps to keep them warm
Last year, it emerged that an astonishing one in three of all of the title’s street sellers in Britain comes from Romania. Most of them — like Iordan — also hail from the country’s Roma gypsy community.
‘My uncle says you make £40-£45 each day selling the magazine,’ he explains, speaking through a translator. ‘Here in Romania, I sometimes don’t make that in a week. That’s why many people like me are putting their hope in your country.’
Iordan, 35, will be treading a well-worn path. So far, 15 of his cousins have gone to the UK, joining around 100,000 of their countrymen. They, too, supported themselves by hawking The Big Issue, but have mostly graduated to higher-paying jobs.
‘Once you are set up in London, they say there is plenty of work,’ he says. ‘I’ll soon find something in construction, or at car washes; wherever the money is best.’
He hopes by Christmas to have saved enough to pay for his wife Daniela, 34, and their two small children to join him in the UK
A change in EU law coming in January means these Romanians can then freely live and work in the UK
They will arrive shortly after New Year’s Day 2014, when all 29 million citizens of Romania and neighbouring Bulgaria will gain full rights to live, work and claim benefits in Britain under EU ‘freedom of movement’ rules.
By the autumn of next year, Iordan hopes to have his eldest child, three-year-old Nicolae, learning ‘the English of the Queen’, free of charge in a state nursery school.
It’s a dream that will soon become much easier for all Romanians to achieve. For the EU law change coming in January means they’ll no longer have to find dubious ways to claim ‘self-employed status’ in order to join the UK labour market.
It’s not surprising, then, that Iordan believes many more of his countrymen will be tempted to hop on to coaches and budget flights to London. ‘In this neighbourhood alone, I think hundreds will go,’ he says ominously.
‘This situation may not last for ever. People want to get into your country before someone decides to padlock the door.’ However, there is nothing to suggest the door into Britain is going to be padlocked any time soon.
Our Government’s response to concerns about the numbers of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria has been shambolic. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said in January that the Government had estimated the number expected but refused to publish the report for fear of ‘scaring’ the public. Yet this week, the Mail revealed Mr Pickles had been mistaken — and there was no such study.
Meanwhile, David Cameron was talking tough on Thursday while campaigning in Eastleigh ahead of the by-election, saying Britain must do more to deter immigrants by cutting their benefits and access to services. Inevitably, the EU immediately warned that restrictions would be unlawful.
But will anything our politicians do quell Iordan Rupa’s ambition to bring his family here? You don’t have to spend long walking the pot-holed streets of Ferentari to appreciate why so many residents are desperate to leave.
Iordan Nel, 44, wearing a Man Utd hat, lost his job two years ago and was evicted from his home. He will move to the UK in January to find work
This slum, in the south-west of Bucharest, is regarded as a no-go area by ordinary Romanians on account of its ubiquitous drug-dealers, street prostitutes and organised crime.
By day, women too poor to afford overcoats, place dressing gowns over their clothes to walk to corner stores, where tinned food and cigarettes are served through metal bars for security. By night, taxi drivers refuse to enter side-streets, for fear of car-jackings. Since two-thirds of local homes do not have proper plumbing, a whiff of raw sewage floats on the icy breeze.
Around 90,000 of the EU’s poorest inhabitants live in Ferentari’s five square miles, across a grim expanse of 1970s apartment blocks, tatty concrete houses, and shacks with breeze-block walls and corrugated iron roofs.
Many of this ethnic underclass in Romania live below the breadline and inhabit what the World Bank calls a ‘deep pocket’ of poverty. It’s hardly surprising that so many dream of an escape.
‘Britain is perfect for me: a place I can find work and start again,’ says Ionida Nei, 44, a Roma who lost his job as an electrician two years ago and was evicted from his home.
‘There is no future here. Nobody thinks of the people of Ferentari. Not the government, not the mayor, not the police. I’m a strong man. I will work hard. I can do construction, farming, anything.’
Ionida lives in appalling squalor inside a wooden shack sandwiched underneath two vast hot water pipes on the edge of a patch of muddy wasteland.
The metal pipes, burning hot to the touch, were built during the Communist era to supply local high-rises with central heating. Today, they stop him freezing to death on cold winter nights.
The Roma gypsies in Romania live in what the World Bank has called a 'deep pocket' of poverty
Too poor even to own a pair of shoes, he ekes out a living — with three men who share the shack — by combing through rubbish tips for scrap metal to sell.
When Romanians are granted unfettered access to Britain, Ionida will find an employment agency in his home country willing to pay his coach fare to the UK — in return for a cut of his future earnings.
‘The people who run these agencies are often gangsters who will steal your wages,’ he says. ‘But when you have nothing, you must take a chance.’
Similar calculations have been made before, by hard-up residents of different countries in Eastern Europe. In 2004, the last time EU rules were relaxed, residents of Poland were granted the right to live and work in the UK.
At the time, the Blair government estimated between 5,000 and 13,000 Poles would come over.
In the event, more than 600,000 have settled, arriving at a rate which peaked at 250,000 in a single year.
Last year’s census revealed Britain is now home to 1,114,368 Eastern Europeans, and Polish is our second most popular language. So could history be about to repeat itself with Romania? The Government won’t — or can’t — say.
But 40,000 Romanians are currently moving to the UK a year thanks to the ‘self-employment’ loophole and allowances for certain industries.
A recent study by the think-tank MigrationWatch UK estimated that number will increase to 70,000 in January, and stay elevated for the next five years, increasing our population by ‘the same as a city the size of Plymouth or Newcastle’.
Some Tory MPs, along with London Mayor Boris Johnson, are concerned about cost of such an influx. A few have called for limits on the numbers of new arrivals, and their access to benefits and public services such as the NHS.
The Romanian government has been angered by such talk, pointing out — rightly — that such a move would be illegal under EU law. Its labour minister, Mariana Campaneau, insisted last week that there’s no reason to expect a surge in migration to the UK in 2014.
Some UK politicians have called for a curb on arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria, but such a move would be illegal under EU law
‘I wonder what the fears are based on,’ she told a British newspaper. ‘There are no concrete arguments for these fears of some journalists and politicians.’ But try telling that to the people of Ferentari.
I bump into Marius Gheorghe as he walks to a supermarket to buy nappies and powdered milk for his one-month-old son, Albert.
A 25-year-old waiter, he spends half his £250-a-month salary renting a tiny apartment. The living room is dominated by a blurry television playing Romanian pop songs.
It is surprising to discover Marius’s partner, Mariana, 27, has a brother who has lived in Solihull for almost five years and runs a cleaning company. She went to visit him last year, and toyed with the idea of staying permanently.
But Mariana was put off by the prospect of having to fill in the lengthy and severe-looking forms from the UK Border Agency. Come January, those forms will be history. Like any parents, the couple are anxious to give their child the best possible future. Marius says: ‘From January, that future is in Britain.’
‘Yes, the cost of living is higher, but at least they allow you to have a decent living. Here, at the end of the month, there’s nothing left.
Statistics bear them out. Between 2004 and 2011, the population of Romania fell from 21,687,000 to 19,043,000. Around a million are now living in Italy, Spain, and France — which had eased freedom of movement rules in that period.
Come January, Marius expects Britain to start pulling in its share. Average salaries in Romania are just under £400 a month, whereas in the UK the figure is £2,208.
‘People here dream with their eyes open, and more and more of them dream of London,’ he says. ‘Yesterday, my bartender said he plans to get a job at a pub near to the Arsenal stadium. He’s a big fan.’
Marius works 60 hours a week, and tells me he’d happily toil even harder, on weekdays and weekends, for a chance to earn the British minimum wage of £6.19 per hour.
While he says he intends to pay his taxes and become a productive member of British society, he will also, like any other legal immigrant, be entitled to claim benefits.
‘I’m coming to work, not for hand-outs,’ he says. ‘But if the system helps support my family, then of course I will take it. Here I get 20 lei (£4) a week in child benefit, and they made me queue for five days to register for it. In your country, I’d get five times that.’
The men say they are coming to the UK to work, not for handouts
Meanwhile, in Britain, it emerged last week that £1 million of taxpayers’ money is already being given in benefits to EU immigrants for 40,000 children who don’t live in the UK.
That figure does not surprise one man who gives his name as Crain, a mechanical engineer who recently returned to Bucharest after four years in London as a builder.
‘There will be a proportion of Romanian people who won’t integrate into society, or get jobs, and will instead try to live off the taxpayer,’ he admits, when we meet at his city centre office.
‘The problem, of course, is that your benefits system will let them do that. It can be too generous. So the solution for this must come from your Government. Make rules that can’t be exploited.’
At a British-themed bar in Bucharest’s pretty historical quarter, I find Vlad Raletchi, 28, an IT specialist, drinking Guinness. This time next year, he’ll be in a real British pub.
‘In the UK, I see companies charging 100 times what I charge here, for the exact same job,’ he says. ‘If you have a degree, Romanian banks will lend the money for your ticket.’
Faced by this universal desire to come to Britain, the Cameron Government has talked of launching an advertising campaign that aims to ‘correct the impression that Britain’s streets are paved with gold’.
Apparently, it will focus on the dreary unpredictability of our weather. But will that really faze the locals? ‘In Romania, winter temperatures can drop below —30C,’ laughs Radhu Blaga, 57, a forklift truck driver from Ferentari who was recently made redundant from a chocolate factory. ‘Parts of the country stay frozen for months.
‘I’ve worked my whole life, but now I can barely pay my bills. I had to sell my car yesterday to settle my debts. Now I’m wondering how to get food. I’d do anything for a job in Britain. So do you really think I’d be put off by a bit of rain?’
The answer is all too plain — and as I will reveal in Part Two of this investigation, there are numerous ruthless gang-masters ready and willing to extract the highest price from these people in their efforts to reach the Promised Land -- Oh I just bet you do sunshine ... well let me tell you something, we're full so fck off!!
Fx 
