On a patch of higher ground in Burgess Park, south London, Abdul points at the building he used to work in. Owned by the State of Qatar, the Shard thrusts greedily upward, master of all it surveys. “I was working as a cleaner, in different places,” Abdul says. “In like, government offices. I was [also] working in the Shard, near London Bridge. It was from midnight till seven in the morning. At night, there was no one inside really. Just some cleaners. Most of the staff, they come in the morning, when we get off.”
Abdul was born in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, and came to the UK as an asylum seeker, fleeing an ongoing conflict that has shaped life in his country since 1991. He is a Somali citizen, but he holds a Yemeni passport, and so the UK Home Office told him he couldn’t seek asylum from Somalia. In court in 2017, the British government department said they would deport Abdul to Yemen. Abdul recalls that the judge said: “I know what is happening in Yemen. Yemen is not safe. War has already started there.”
At this point, a misunderstanding typical of the highly bureaucratised, opaque British immigration system seems to have occurred. Abdul believed he had been given ten years leave to remain in the UK. A couple of weeks later, a biometric card arrived. It needed to be renewed every two and a half years – that renewal would cost Abdul upwards of £2,000. He had been left with no recourse to public funding (NRPF), and the work he was doing as a cleaner or as a kitchen hand in a “big restaurant near Hyde Park Corner” all paid minimum wage.
