It’s a testament to the sensitivity of the issue that when I met the first immigrant I interviewed for this piece it was in private and they agreed only on the assurance that their identity would not be revealed. That, says Leonor Daza from the charity Caledonians in Challaid who help people moving here for the first time, is not uncommon. Too many people, she says, are coming across the ocean for a better life and to get it they must first spend a year living in fear and suffering exploitation.
“I couldn’t say anything,” the young woman tells me. She’s twenty and nervous, speaking to me in the Earmam office of Caledonians in Challaid. She’s been in the country for eleven months and one more month of employment will entitle her to the dual passport she came for. It hasn’t been an easy first eleven. “I know I get paid a lot less than the minimum but I can’t say it. I have to work long, long hours and I can’t complain because I know I will lose my job. They always say that, if you are trouble you lose your job and then you won’t get another, no passport.”
This is a story repeated by many mouths. With twelve months of employment required for a dual passport the threat of losing a job is the threat of losing the opportunity to become not just a citizen of Scotland but Europe. Many feel they are being held hostage by unscrupulous employers who see them as cheap and disposable labor, easy to mistreat and, when they leave after twelve months, easy to replace with more young people arriving in the city from the Caledonian countries.
“It’s a fairly even split between people from Panama and those from Costa Rica,” Leonor Daza tells me in the same CIC office, a small place that receives no government or council funding. “Even though there are more people in Costa Rica, Panama has longer and more ingrained links here so it balances out. Very few come from Nicaragua because the passport laws are so much more restrictive for them. The people who come are mostly young, in their late teens or twenties, and they have their whole lives ahead of them. They take jobs paying criminally low wages, often the jobs no one from Challaid would do, and they’re forced to work in unacceptable, dangerous conditions. Most will share a flat in Earmam or Whisper Hill with six or seven other people, a one- or two-bedroom flat, and they say they’re willing because it’s only twelve months and at the end they can leave.”
The young woman I’ve come to interview doesn’t want to tell me where she lives, but she does admit she shares with five other people. “It’s not great. It has one bedroom and three of us sleep there, three in the living room. The landlord knows there are six, he charges for six.”
That too is a breach of the law, both housing and safety regulations, but landlords also see “twelve monthers” as a chance to make easy money. Knowing that this is happening, what are Challaid council doing about it? Eunan O’Brien, Liberal Party, is the council spokesman on immigration. “We have clear policies already in place to make sure that all people coming here, wherever from, are treated with the respect they deserve, and are protected by the same laws that we would expect all citizens of Challaid to enjoy.” When I point out that these laws don’t appear to be enough to protect the twelve monthers he half shrugs. “It’s a problem, not of powers but of enforcement. If people don’t report criminal activity then there’s not a lot that can be done. We’re committed to making sure people feel able to report these things, and we’ve always said that if immigrants have themselves done nothing wrong then they have nothing to fear from police contact.”
It’s a familiar promise with exasperating wording to Leonor Daza. “The council have been committed to improving the lives of Caledonians in Challaid since the CIC was founded nearly thirty years ago, what they haven’t actually gotten round to doing yet is improving the situation for anyone from Caledonia. And the language has never changed either, always the hint that an immigrant might have done something wrong, that they must be scared of the police rather than an abuser.”
Due to a delay in completing interviews this piece didn’t appear in last month’s issue as planned, so I realized that the young woman I’d interviewed at the CIC would have completed her twelve months. I managed to get back in touch with her. She told me that on the day she got her dual passport she quit her job, left her flat and got on a train that took her all the way down to London, despite the uncertainty of her status there as the British leave Europe. She already has a new job and a better life. Although she still doesn’t want her name to be used in the article, she did give me the name of her employer in Challaid, Highland Specialist Plastics.
HSP have a factory making tailored plastic parts for export in Bakers Moor, using part of an old warehouse building that was once one of many belonging to the famed Challaid Whaling Company. I asked HSP for a comment and they stated that they were “committed to the best working practices and to ensuring that all employees from Caledonia were treated fairly and given the best chance to gain their passport.” When I visited their factory security wouldn’t allow me to enter and none of their employees were willing to speak to me. HSP, it seems, are one of many for whom commitment to rhetoric on the twelve-month question is not matched in reality by a commitment to the people at the heart of it.