Romanians recently overtook the Irish and Indians as the second-biggest immigrant community in the UK (people from Poland make up the largest group), but they are among the most vulnerable in the country after Brexit, according to a leading charity advocating for Eastern Europeans in the UK.
Many fill jobs that keep Britain’s supermarket shelves stocked, the elderly in care homes fed and hotel rooms clean, but there are fears that social and economic isolation among those in the low-skills sector could prove a calamitous mix for the many who would wish to remain in the country after Brexit. “The majority of EU citizens are not very well informed about Brexit and the settled status and Romanians are no exception,” says Florina Tudose, an outreach worker with the East European Resource Centre. “The language barrier, the fact that most Romanian citizens don’t follow UK media at all, makes them quite vulnerable,” Tudose explains.
“From our field research and extensive outreach within the Romanian community, we’ve noticed that many Romanians think that the settled status will be an automatic process, that as long as they pay taxes and are law-abiding citizens, everything is going to be OK,” she adds.
The Guardian accompanied Tudose to meet some of the Romanians in communities in two areas of north London and found these fears were borne out. One woman, in her 40s, in a Romanian butcher’s shop, explained that she had no worries about Brexit. “I lived in Italy for 17 years, I didn’t know if I was illegal, nobody cared, I wasn’t stopped once, why should it be any different here?” she says.
Others wrongly believed that the Home Office knew who they were and, as long as they paid taxes, registration would be automatic. “They will send us letters,” one young shop assistant tells Tudose. “I am not worried at all about Brexit. Why should I be? I’ve been here nine years and pay taxes and they will see that,” she says, showing an alarming lack of knowledge about the Home Office plans or the consequences of not registering, which could include deportation or denial of re-entry into the country after a holiday.
“Sadly,” says Tudose, “you hear this a lot. How are the Home Office going to get to these people? This is why we are worried.”
Dragoș Grinici, 37, chef
“What will England do without us?” asks Grinici, who works in a Romanian restaurant in Dollis Hill, north London, an area popular with Romanians. In November of 2016, he was lured to the UK from Germany by a large nursing-home group.
“British people accounted for just ten per cent of the staff. But they weren’t considered reliable. They would call in sick, especially after the weekends, and then the Romanians would be called to go in and cover for them. Half of the 35 staff were Romanian, just three or four were from the UK,” Grinici says.
“It wasn’t fair,” he adds. “Last year in November, December, during the bad weather, they all called in to say they couldn’t come in. There was only two centimetres of snow. I had to take my car and personally pick up other Romanians. We couldn’t not go to work — these are elderly people, some have dementia. In my country, you are one with the elderly, you have responsibilities and you get that drummed into you. Our work ethic and sense of responsibility is higher than it is here.”
Asked what he thinks the British think about Romanians, Grinici says: “Every shepherd has its black sheep, so do countries.” He is referring to the “criminals” in his community, who he says give “Romanians a bad name”.
He shows videos of expensive cars and lavish mansions in his home town, Țăndărei, known as “Beverly Hills for Romanian gangsters”. It is a narrative that fits well with Brexit supporters, and one that is often heard in the Romanian community, says Tudose.
Grinici, like others, sees himself as a highly mobile worker feeding his family back home, where his wife and seven-year-old daughter still live. “We don’t have any future in Romania because of the corruption,” he says.
Over the past 20 years, Grinici has lived in Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, Holland, Malta, Italy and Germany. He speaks five languages and thinks Britain would “be in trouble” if it pulled up the drawbridge to EU citizens.
“Where will they get the women for all the low-skilled jobs?” he asks. “If we go home, who is going to do the jobs? It is a bit racist, but it is their own decision. We are all here to work, we pay taxes, we pay rent, we pay insurance, buy food, pay bank fees. There will be a price to pay.”
Roxana Berlotan, 30, berry-farm team leader
With a master’s degree in agricultural engineering, Berlotan first came to Britain for adventure. She has been working on the harvests of a berry farm in Kent since 2010. She didn’t intend to stay, but like many EU citizens in Britain, has settled here.
She is earning good money, but she’s fed up with the way Romanians are treated — not on the farm, but by the wider community — and is unsure of her future here.
“I am happy here, I just don’t like it when people say: ‘You are Romanian, you come here just to take our jobs, you are gypsies, you take benefits.’ I have not taken £1 here without working for it,” she says. “Any English person who comes here and asks for a job at the farm will get a job with open arms, but they are not coming and still people in this country say we are stealing their jobs.”
Was she surprised by the vote to leave the EU? “No,” she says, “because you can see it on people’s faces. They hate us. In the supermarket you see how they look at you when they hear you speak Romanian. It’s better just to shut up. They do not like us.”
Berlotan stresses that her employers and all the English people on the farm “treat everyone equally”. The raspberry and soft-fruit farm’s owner has frequently expressed fears that he will not be able to recruit staff after Brexit.
But she says the perception of Romanians in Britain is otherwise ugly. “British people say they are not racist, but they think we are here as slaves just because we do this work and then they treat us like that.” She says fewer Romanians are now coming to Britain as word has got back that it is not all a bed of roses for agricultural workers.
Berlotan says she needs 20 more people to cope with this year’s crop, “but they don’t come here” — neither British nor Eastern Europeans. “They don’t like the rain, the mud, the hard work.”
Berlotan arrived in the UK when the principal agricultural recruitment agency, Concordia, offered her a job after she graduated with a primary degree in agronomy. At the time, a first job in Romania would have earned her £300 a month, and with the promise of the same amount a week in England, she made the journey to Kent. It was hard work, but an exciting adventure, she explains.
Her day starts at 4 a.m., when she gets up at the house she shares with her boyfriend. She is on the farm at 5.45 a.m. to lead her team of 40.
They have a 15-minute tea break at 8.30 a.m. and continue to 11 a.m., when they have 30 minutes for lunch, with a further tea break at 1.30 p.m. Normally, the day ends at 3 p.m., but they continue for another hour during the peak harvest. By the time Berlotan gets home, at around 6 p.m., she just has time to “shower, cook and eat and then go to bed around 8.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m.”. Despite the gruelling hours, she appreciates her life in Britain. “I would like to stay here, it’s already our home in a way, but [with] this Brexit, we are not sure we want to make a life here,” she comments.
“Do we want to get a mortgage? We could get one, but next year they could say we can’t stay here, so we have no security. Sometimes you just want to pack your bags and leave and say: ‘Okay, I’ve had enough.’”
Cristina Nitscu, hairdresser
It wasn’t easy for Nitscuto leave Romania — she needed to make money and had to leave her daughter at home. “It was really hard. I didn’t know anyone here,” she says.
“I didn’t know much about Britain. I knew something about the queen. I knew it was expensive, but that I would earn more money here. Then when I got here I realized it was not so easy to save.”
Asked if the savings are for her daughter, Nitscu begins to cry. “It is very hard to be here without her. I need the money for her school. It is why I am here, to pay for my daughter to have private music, to learn foreign languages, she’s also learning taekwondo.
“If I wasn’t here she would have none of these things,” Nitscu adds. “I would like her to come here but because of Brexit I cannot be certain. She is in primary school now. I’m not going to bring her here and then we find out we have to leave,” she says.
Life is still hard for Nitscu, but better than back home, she believes. She lives in a shared house with six people, each in a room of their own. Living on the outskirts of London costs £600 a month in rent and she hardly ever goes out to socialize or see the sights in the capital, as she works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week.
Moving back to Bucharest wouldn’t make economic sense, though. She would have to pay £400 a month in rent and would never earn enough money for her daughter and 72-year-old father, who is on a pension of €200 a month. “He couldn’t survive without my money,” she says.
Sîrbu Tiberius, 46, shop worker
Tiberius has just arrived in London to work in a Romanian butcher’s shop in Burnt Oak. He stands at the counter, while his boss tells the East European Resource Centre how two women shouted at them “to go home” that morning in the lane beside his shop.
Like Nitscu, he came to Britain to give his child, a 13-year-old-boy, a better life. “I want to secure a future for him, to send him to university.”
He is from Botoșani, the poorest part of Romania, and the lack of work prompted him to leave years ago. He has worked at markets selling vegetables all his life, but in Romania he was earning just £8 a day “and that would be on a good day”, Tiberius says.
In London, he hopes to earn around £1,200 a month, of which £300 is committed to a single room in a house share. Gas and electricity on top of that would still leave him with enough to repatriate, if he does not spend money on going out.
He is now on a trial work period at the shop but is full of hope for what he can earn for his family. “I am willing to work hard. I want to stay 20 years here until my retirement.”
Like Nitscu, he has seen none of the treasures of London’s museums and galleries, restaurants and shops, or the capital’s nightlife. “I am afraid to spend money right now,” he explains.
He hadn’t heard of Brexit and it was a friend who told him of the Burnt Oak job. If he weren’t in London, he would be somewhere else in Europe earning for his parents and son. He spent a year in Turkey and two years working in a market in Poland.
Ovidiu Șarpe, 72, bakery owner
Șarpe is one of the best-known Romanians in the community in Britain, having lived in the country for nearly 40 years. He risked his life to escape the terrors of Romania’s communist dictatorship in 1979. He speaks seven languages, has a thriving bakery business in north London and was once a partner in a chain of pizzerias.
But his arrival on a boat from Eastern Europe was purely a fluke. His wife had died in an accident, leaving him with five small children, the youngest just six months old, to bring up on his own. After six years as a widower, and with the Ceaușescu regime in its first flushes of dictatorship, he decided his best chance was to leave the country by stowing away on a ship heading to Freiberg in East Germany, where he had some friends.
While on board, the ship was rechartered and he ended up in Turkey and then — by chance — in Kent, having lost half his body weight as a stowaway. “It was a huge risk. We had political prisons. You could have been sentenced to 15 years in a labour camp or disappeared.”
He went straight to Amnesty International and, after three weeks, he got a job in the Basel St Hotel behind Harrods in London, giving him a start in the hospitality trade.
As for Brexit, he says: “I don’t know if the government is prepared. Romanians work everywhere, in hospitals, coffee shops, garbage, they work in Asda, Iceland, some are in good positions, working in management, in homes for the elderly. The English aren’t going to take those jobs. They won’t do the shit jobs.
“I think Brexit is done to get rid of all the people on benefits,” he adds, and complains about fellow Romanians who come to the UK to take advantage — as he sees it — of the British system. “I have five children and am a single parent but I did not take any benefit for all that time.”
He adds: “There is trash in every country. But they are blaming 98 per cent of Romanians for what the two per cent do. You feel embarrassed sometimes to say you’re Romanian.”
Cătălin Constandiș, 36, farm manager
Theology postgraduate Constandiș has been in the UK on and off since 2006, first on a seasonal agriculture workers’ scheme that allowed temporary immigration from Bulgaria and Romania ahead of full accession to the EU. He and his wife are now British citizens and will be here at least until they retire.
Constandiș believes that UK seasonal work is becoming less attractive, largely because the pound is so weak. In 2006, the pound would buy €1.46. Now, it will buy just €1.12 and the price of accommodation and food has gone up.
But the big appeal for Constandiș was a career. He progressed from picker, to supervisor, to team leader, to line manager and is now a farm manager, running a £7 million-turnover section of the berry fields where he manages a team of 260 people.
He is from a middle-class family who could afford to send their son to university, but Constandiș says such a career trajectory would not have existed at home. “Here I could build a career on my own steam. In Romania you need to know someone to help you. You would never have become a farm manager in 12 years,” he says.
From the beginning, the money was relatively attractive, with wages of £350 to £380 a week on a fruit farm in Herefordshire. “With the money I was able to buy land in Romania, plant cherry trees, renovate my father’s house, buy new furniture and put in central heating,” he says. “When I think of Britain then, the prices of food and fuel were lower, you could buy a lot more and save a lot more. There was never any racism towards us.”
Constandiș thought he would eventually go home, but a growing family and a good career made him rethink his plans, and he became a British citizen — an expensive insurance policy he took out against Brexit. He paid £1,273 for each application, plus £150 each for the English test and £50 each for the Life in the United Kingdom test. Not a trifling figure. “I was quite stressed about it, I took it very seriously,” he says. “It was a lot of money. I paid taxes for 12 years and just to secure my future I had to pay that.”
He works hard but he likes his life in a quiet village in the West Country. “It’s clean, there are plenty of green areas and parks, and we have friends in towns around here.”
Many Romanians are returning home: the economy there is getting stronger. But he thinks Romanians will continue to migrate throughout Europe for years to come.
© Guardian News & Media 2018