“My heart, my mind, is in England”

September 5, 2023 3:40 AM

The Albanian town that TikTok emptied Since the fall of communism in 1991, Kukes has lost roughly half of its population. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (8 comments total)

I would like to go to Kukes actually.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 4:41 AM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

£4k for passage to the UK from Albania is both an extortionate amount of money - you can buy a one-way Tirana-London plane ticket for less than £50 - and also pretty affordable. It's not much more than a UK passport holder would need to fund a working holiday in Australia, and lots and lots people in their 20s do that every year.
posted by plonkee at 5:32 AM on September 5, 2023

That is a fascinating piece - thank you. I live in a part of London the anthropologist's term a 'metropolitan entry point' - the soft underbelly of the city where the police fear to tread, the old Victorian houses lend themselves to multi occupancy (and no less to gentrification) and centuries of inward migration pave the way for the next. Some are more conspicuous than others - when the Kosovan War ended a newly redundant militia suddenly appeared on the high street selling smuggled cigarettes - smartly dressed, buff looking young guys in black roll necks, black leather jackets and black jeans in twos and threes every 20 yards or so chirping wood pecker style - cigrett! ciggrett! ciggret! All day and half the night, every day and then they were gone. A decade ago we had close to a civil war between the Kurds and Turks over control of the drug trade - apparently the Kurds got us, and the Turks rule from a road parallel to our high street a 15 minute walk away. The violence stopped. In fact the area smartened up a lot and was very peaceful for a decade - talk on the street was that the Kurdish Workers Party, a bank or two and the cartel came together to give us the best governance we'd known in a long time. Then they left. Or perhaps became legit. Restaurant after restaurant was taken over to whitewash the drug money. Shops too. Quite amusing and revealing when the corner shop is stocked up to and well over the gunnels and undercutting huge national supermarkets next door. The Eritean-Ethiopian war (s) has fed a new wave, earlier the troubles of Sudan, and of Somalia did likewise..... (I was in Specsavers when some poor devil nicked a cheapo pair of frames from the rack and galloped out the door.... I must have spoken out loud, "My God what have we come to that it is worth someone's while to nick throw away frames. This place is hell" - or somesuch. When a voice replied quietly, "It's a lot better than Mogadishu... in fact, its paradise." A friendly old East African guy, possibly Somalian, giving me perspective. "Its a lot better than Mogadishu" has become a household mantra when any of us are getting our knickers in a twist about nothing.) The construction industry is pivotal of course. The painters, chippies and brickies that help me maintain my crumbling old house were once Greek Cypriots, they're currently Ukrainian, and yes there was an Albanian generation too. Where did they go? I vaguely recall a Metropolitan Police Commisioner saying that, they have faster cars, bigger guns, are better organised and frankly have better recruits than the Met. There was talk of a bloodless coup ( I doubt that) and 'the Albanians' displaced the old London gang families that controlled Soho and the associated prostitution, drugs and more. Lord knows. The piece you posted affirms the human face, the complexity, the painful individuality of these processes. Good that it does. Helps me to keep human (e).
posted by dutchrick at 6:08 AM on September 5, 2023 [48 favorites]

I get what you're saying about relative amounts.

But 4k is also a bit over half of an average Albanian's income for a calendar year.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:08 AM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I do feel like this story gets mad-libbed for each generation with a different emigrating nationality/culture, foreign promised land, method of entry (legal or not), and maybe mode of communication. How many [Irish bog-trotters] came to [America] because their cousin [wrote home] about the streets being paved with gold, and when they got there the only jobs available were the shit jobs that the natives couldn't be bothered to do, and the only really good paying ones were with the gangs? And the more people leave, the less there is to return to if they change their minds. Hell, you can see that happening at home, with small-town America withering away progressively. Somewhere--really, a bunch of somewheres--there is an early 80s Springsteen album happening.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:30 AM on September 5, 2023 [13 favorites]

Fuck the Border [Loud punk rock, the lyrics are eminently apropos]
posted by chavenet at 3:54 PM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oof, lots of feelings about this one. I lived in the Balkans for a couple years long before social media, and the exodus of young people and trafficking were big enough issues even without the lure of the algorithm.

The number of times I heard something like "given the chance to have a good life, [I] would live in [my country] forever," as David says, made my heart ache. And I was living in a city where people who wanted to stay in the country were trying to make it work. The villages basically had no young people.

Every family had someone(s) they saw at most once a year because they had emigrated. My friends were open about how hard that was, how they both envied and were sad for their family abroad, because they could see how they struggled with being apart from their friends and family, even as they were celebrated for having "made it."

Some of my friends have been able to stay. Some of them had to leave. Mercifully, none of them had to do so at risk to their lives or wellbeing. I knew the lucky ones, and it was hard enough for them.
posted by EvaDestruction at 4:10 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, though I still have questions, mainly, why is England such an attraction? It's a country with low wages and bad conditions of living unless you are very, very rich. Heck, I have some very rich relatives who moved away because quality of life is just not the same as on the continent where they live now. Why does anyone pass through several nice, safe European countries to go to England and work shit jobs? Is there an unspoken thing where they know they are going into criminality -- the whole fancy car and cash thing seems to indicate that?

I get that the EU has harsh immigration policies, but so does the UK, and I'd bet that Italy is much more lenient towards illegal immigrants than the UK (which doesn't mean it is a good life there either). Italy has tons of Albanian immigrants, perhaps the harsh reality of life there is better known in Albania?

In general, life as an illegal immigrant in Europe including the UK is much harder and more hopeless than in the US. I remember being very confused by the US situation when I lived there. In Europe, you will not ever get a work permit or legal status, unless you are granted asylum or if you have essential skills, like being a brain surgeon (but one of my students interviewed a doctor from West Africa who was living on the streets and couldn't afford to return home). And without legal status, you cannot rent or buy a home, and you cannot get a real job. So you will be doing underpaid, illegal work and most likely be unhoused, or be housed by your crooked employer. I've heard of employers housing their illegal workers in shipping containers, with no access to bathrooms or kitchens and no insulation against heat or cold. Others are housed in tents or stables. This is the base level. And then it gets worse, in some countries. Apart from crime, most of the work is in agriculture and some in construction, at the bottom line.

If you are a legal immigrant, that is a different case. I knew an Albanian couple who had built a very comfortable life here in Denmark, and were able to maintain a farm back in their old village and pay people there to work on it. They were sad that their sons grew up feeling Danish, though.
posted by mumimor at 2:03 AM on September 6, 2023 [4 favorites]