Children Immigrating Alone to the UK - seeking an education

Many people say that the U.S. Civil Rights Movement got a huge kick start from the unfortunate murder of Emmett Till.  The French movie, "Welcome" is doing the same in Europe.  

For us in the United States the film could be very helpful.  While most immigrants here are from Spanish Speaking countries, the idea of a young man struggling to immigrate to the UK so he can get an education resonates with American DREAMers.

The movie "Welcome" may be the answer for those nativists who cringe every time they think of Mexican immigration.  The protagonist is a young boy who is not European, yet he is not Mexican either.  The film might have a chance at seducing anti-immigrationists into having empathy for a kid just trying to get an education.

Once the movie reaches the states it will be important to encourage everyone to see it.

see "France hails film drama of refugee's desperate swim across the Channel," London Observer, March 8, 2009

---

Welcome to Calais

March 17, 2009

Champs-Elysees Blog

Reflections on life in France and French Culture

Talk of the town this week is the new film by Philippe Lioret called 'Welcome', which looks at the human drama unfolding at the northern port of Calais. That is where hundreds of migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere gather with the purpose of secretly crossing the Channel to England in the back of lorries. They are generally thwarted in their endeavours, because security is tight, but enough evidently do make it over to keep hopes alive. In the meantime the migrants live rough in makeshift camps on the outskirts of Calais, subsisting on hand-outs from charity and looked on with a certain resentment by many locals.

Periodically French government ministers feel compelled to promise more substantial shelter -- but this immediately triggers howls of protest from the right-wing press in Britain. Across the Channel, there is a paranoid fixation that France is going to create a new 'Sangatte' -- this being the name of the holding centre for migrants that became a kind of operational HQ for the people-smugglers. Sangatte was closed in 2002 by the then interior minister -- one Nicolas Sarkozy -- but the same humanitarian arguments that led to its creation in the first place (i.e. the crying disgrace of hundreds of men living under tarpaulin) continue to apply today.

This is the backdrop to the film, which is about how a swimming instructor -- played by the very watchable Vincent Lindon -- befriends a young Kurd who wants to swim across to England to be with his girlfriend. Unlike so many French films, 'Welcome' is well-constructed and has enough dramatic tension to keep the viewer engaged. It also sheds much-needed light on the plight of so many stranded migrants, living in abject misery on one side of the Channel with the white cliffs of their eldorado visible just 20 miles away...more

---

The Sunday Times (London)
March 22, 2009
Edition 1

Children risking lives to sneak into Britain;
People smuggling Young boys are among those waiting in squalor to cross the Channel, reports Matthew Campbell in Calais

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 26

HE has crossed deserts, seas and mountains in pursuit of his dream, but the English Channel is proving more of an obstacle.

Sawab, a 12-year-old Afghan boy, is reduced to living under a piece of plastic in Calais while awaiting a passage to Britain.

Sawab is one of a growing band of children who have joined the throng of supposed refugees hoping to hide in lorries travelling from Calais to Dover, increasing pressure on the French to offer humanitarian aid in spite of British complaints that this will merely attract more migrants.

"It's becoming commonplace to see children travelling without parents," said Vincent Lenoir, a 30-year-old biology teacher who helps to run a soup kitchen in the evenings. "They get younger and younger." The children live in "the Jungle", as locals call their small, rubbish-strewn wood near the northern French port. Sawab, who sleeps in a cardboard box, was foraging for firewood when I met him last week. He speaks no English so an older boy translated. complete article