Girls ‘sold’ into a city of despair

Press, 24 September 1980, Page 21

Girls ‘sold’ into a city of despair

A solitary and distraught young woman stands on the platform of a London underground railway station. As the train roars in, she hurls herself under the wheels.

This modem variant of Anna Karenina’s suicide is now showing in Colombian cinemas: the girl came from there and the film’s story is based on fact.

It is entitled “Bienvenida a Londres” and sheds remarkable light on a normally obscure section of London’s immigrant community: thousands of Colombians working long hours for low wages as hotel chambermaids, waitresses, and domestic servants in private houses., V

Many have outstayed their entry permits and are liable to be instantly deported if caught They accept reduced wages as the price for not being exposed. For the girl who killed herself, the pressures became too much. - Her story was unearthed by Maria Emma Mejia, the film’s director, who two years ago had a clerical job in the Colombian consulate in London. One day she discovered in a safe a

mall.copper box wrapped in brown paper. She was told it contained the ashes of an unidentified Colombian girl who had thrown herself under a train in 1976. “There they had remained since her cremation; nobody had claimed them and nobody ever will,’’ she said. Maria Mejia leamt of more suicides among her 12,000 countrymen and women in Britain, and visited others who had become . patients in psychiatric hospitals.

She made the semifictional film as a warning to Colombians eager to learn English —- a passport, perhaps, to a job with a prestigious American company for ambitious secretaries — and likely to be customers for agencies specialising in obtaining permits for jobs in England. The agencies often demand crippling interest rate repayments for air tickets and fees for finding jobs. Many Colombian girjs come on permits ar-

ranged by a shadowy operator in Bogota known as the “Captain.” Welfare workers in London who deal with a steady stream of Colombians give a variety of explanations for the unusually heavy immigration from the country; most are not from Bogota, but from Colombia’s second and third cities, Medellin and Cali. Agency rackets have been exposed in both cities. “No other country in Latin America has such a

conscious policy of exporting labour,” said Maria Bonet, of the Immigration Unit at London’s Paddington Law Centre. “There are at least a million Colombians in Venezuela and large Colombian communities in European countries.” British immigration officials appear to -be mounting an offensive against work permit forgeries and this chiefly affects the Colombians, several thousand Filipinos given permits

during the 19705, and hotel and catering workers from Middle Eastern countries, particularly Morocco. In May, police and immigration officials raided the London Hilton and, armed with a general warrant, herded dozens of the junior staff into the ballroom where they were interviewed. Twelve were detained and several have been deported. One of .the most con-

troversial results of this drive is the question mark hanging over the fate of 228 Filipinos, who are alleged by the Home Office to have made false declarations about whether they had any children when they applied to enter Britain ,— often as long as seven or eight years ago. Forty-two have been deported; 36 were alloewd to stay on compassionate grounds; one has absconded; and Timothy Raison, the Home Office Minister concerned, “ has yet to make a decision about the others. Copyright, London Observer Service,