09.55 am
“Good morning, please your identification.” The woman behind the welcome desk of the UMC Utrecht looks tightly at her computer screen. Susan bends forward to her handbag on the walker. She takes a few letters out and stops them again. The desk clerk looks up. “Le-gi-ti-ma -tie. “ Susan makes a letter with the hospital appointment at the counter.
Susan fears these kinds of places the most, she says afterwards. Intake dishes of authorities where she has to give her name. “I always think that people immediately realize that I have no papers and that they then call the police.”
The House of Representatives adopted a law at the beginning of this month that must make illegality punishable. The proposal is assessed by the Senate after the summer. Both the undocumented themselves and the people who help them run the risk of being prosecuted. Who are the undocumented people who would become ‘criminal’ by this new law? What does their life look like and what changes?
NRC Run for a day with Susan (59) from Ghana and Patrick (70) from Algeria. Their full names are known to the editors. Both have been living in the Netherlands for decades without papers. Where Susan starts this Wednesday with a hospital appointment in Utrecht, Patrick is waiting a visit to his new lawyer in the morning.
Susan has been in the Netherlands for 24 years and has no residence permit.
Patrick has been staying undocumented in the Netherlands for more than forty years.
Photos Mona van den Berg
11.00 am
“I slept badly,” says Patrick when he comes to white sneakers. Although this is his fourth lawyer, he looks tense. He has a worn Albert Heijn bag with papers.
The law firm is housed on an Amsterdam canal, diagonally above a walk -in house for homeless people. Patrick came to the Netherlands from Algeria in 1984. In those forty years he was never able to get a residence permit. Now that he is seventy, he wants to make a new attempt.
Lawyer Annechien de Vries is not amused. Patrick has forgotten to email his file to her. “Now I have not been able to read.”
Patrick: “It’s busy in my head. Very busy.”
De Vries: “I am also very busy. Then you have to tell me the story. On what grounds have you tried to get a stay so far?”
Patrick hands her a plastic folder.
The lawyer browses a few seconds through his papers, but the file is incomplete. Only a fraction of Patrick’s history is in the folder. Decisions of the IND are missing, just like judgments of the court. De Vries: “You have to give information that I can do something with. I can’t conjure up. How else can I help you?”
Patrick silently puts the papers back in his plastic bag. “Are you angry with me?”
Patrick wants to start a case at the European Court, he says, that is recommended to him by his previous lawyer. “I am seventy. I have dry eyes. Diabetes. And polyneuropathy [een zenuwziekte die de spieren aantast]. My body hurts everywhere. ”
De Vries: “Are you being treated for this?”
Patrick: “I get medication.”
De Vries: “Through Article 64 you can claim postponement of departure, for medical reasons. But then you have to be very sick. Dry eyes is nothing. I also have eczema on my fingers. If you can prove that you are dead if you don’t get treatment, you have a chance.”
De Vries looks at the clock. “Try to build a medical file, and then come back.” She points him to social workers in Amsterdam who can help him with that. “I can now help you with zero, Nada.
Patrick silently puts his papers back in his plastic bag. “Are you angry with me?”
De Vries: “No, I’m not angry with you. I have a lot of clients, I have to be strict. Success, boy.”
Patrick quietly walks down the stairs. When he is back on the street: “The coffee was good, isn’t it? Not too strong.”
Patrick has a room at a HVO-Querido, a reception organization for homeless people.
Photo Mona van den Berg
13.00
Susan’s lungs have since been checked in UMC Utrecht. Because she can hardly walk, an acquaintance picks her up at the hospital. The transport costs are paid by the World House of the Protestant churches of Amsterdam. A form of help that would be prohibited in the bill. But Susan is completely dependent on the support of churches, acquaintances or social organizations. Her rent (350 euros) is partly funded by a Ghanaian church from the neighborhood, from the Wereldhuis she gets supermarket vouchers for 21 euros a week. There are also Ghanaian friends and acquaintances who regularly put her money, wash her clothes, and sometimes cook for her.
Susan hires a bedroom in the apartment of a Ghanaese, which she knows through via. The bedroom is chock full: a single bed, a wooden table and a large white oxygen tank are enclosed by boxes and bags. There are strict house rules: Susan has to clean the flat, should not sit on the couch in the living room and visit is not welcome.
But she is already happy with a bed. In Ghana she grew up for mostly without parents. A man who found her “pathetic” brought her twenty -five years ago to the Netherlands. Together they lived with other Ghanaians. Sometimes there was no mattress, Susan says: “Then I slept on a chair at the dining table.”
He left her more than ten years ago. “He said, We are not married, I am not obliged to do anything.” Susan has moved seven times since then, she has almost always lived with Ghanaians in Amsterdam Southeast.
Initially she paid the rent from her own income: she cleaned offices in Amsterdam for years. She ‘borrowed’ someone else’s work permit in order to work ‘legally’. The wage was deposited into the bank account of the person with the work permit, which calculated a percentage for this service. The intermediary kept a third for himself. “I had little choice, otherwise I couldn’t eat.”
The cleaning work came abruptly when she stumbled over the cord of the vacuum cleaner and fell off the stairs during a service. Since then she has been walking with a walker.
2.11 pm
Smiling, Patrick enters a Moroccan eatery. “As-Salamu AlaykumEverthing okay?” He sits down at a table and greets a man.
Behind a plate of steaming lentil soup, Patrick tells that he came to the Netherlands because there was a fight in the family. His both parents have since died. On one of his first days in the Netherlands, he came up with a new name for himself, when the police held him – it became Patrick Poitier. “PP,” says Patrick. “That sounds good and is easy to remember.” Everywhere he introduces himself as Patrick.
He no longer works, but Patrick has had several ‘black’ jobs. In a coffee shop, in the wardrobe of a dancing. Nowadays he comes out of the 62 euro living money that he receives every week from the municipality. He receives his room from HVO-Querido, a reception organization for homeless people. There he is in the residents’ committee as part of his daytime activities.
He is the residents’ committee of his reception location, as part of his daytime activities.
Photo Mona van den Berg
After the lentil soup, he takes the metro to the reception location. There is a meeting on the criminalization of illegality on the program. In the light ‘living room’ there is a pool table and LPs hang on the wall. Patrick takes a seat on the couch with fifteen other undocumented people.
The project manager undocumented people from the municipality of Amsterdam takes the floor. “We are very shocked by the adopted asylum law and the criminalization of undocumented people,” says the civil servant, who emphasizes that Amsterdam “does not agree”. “Everyone has the right to a bed, bath and bread,” she says.
A question from the room. “What if you don’t have an ID card and you are arrested by the police?”
The civil servant: “We are now discussing this with the police about this. We want to agree that they do not put undocumented people in detention.”
Patrick: “You can’t just put the police on the street and ask for your ID.”
Some people don’t have a house in their home country at all. They have nothing
“Do all undocumented people have to go back to their home country?” Asks a long lean man.
Civil servant: “The government wants that, but we as the municipality of Amsterdam don’t. Some people don’t have a house in their home country at all. They have nothing.”
A woman on the couch: “I would like to go to Germany or Belgium with girlfriends. Is that possible?”
Patrick: “I have heard that people are sometimes arrested.” It is better not to travel, says the civil servant.
“And what can you say to tellers? People who say: I know you are illegal, I’m going to tell you,” asks another woman.
The civil servant: “You can tell those people that the law has not yet been adopted by the Senate. We are working on an informative flyer about this.”
Silence in the room. Time for the coffee break.
7 pm
Susan slowly maneuvers her walker past low -rise apartments and terraced houses in Amsterdam Southeast. After five minutes she stops and sits on a wall. The sweat is on her forehead.
At the end of the afternoon, Susan still has to pick up her medicines, at home she is not allowed to receive a mail from the landlord. That is why she has her medication delivered to a friend from the neighborhood, a 74-year-old woman who runs a package point at home with her daughter.
The door opens. “Hey Momma! How are you?“A large plastic bag with packages shifts the passage in the hallway. The daughter folds the walker into. Susan shuffles the kitchen, where a man prepares a salted pork leg. Everywhere there are plastic bags with mail packages. There are packages displayed in the windowsill.
Susan hires a bedroom in the apartment of a Ghanaese, which she knows through via.
Susan just before her departure from Ghana, 24 years ago.
Photos Mona van den Berg
The daughter gives Susan a bag with medicines. “I can use this for three months,” says Susan. A customer is at the door. The daughter fishes a package from the big bag.
“She has a friend again,” the woman tells Susan and points to her daughter. “He lives in Ghana, but he will come here in October. He has never been to Amsterdam,” says the daughter. “I feel like a twenty -year -old, so in love.”
And Susan and love? She looks at the floor and then up, as if she is looking at her own body. “Who wants a sick woman?” The girlfriend shakes her head, then strictly: “You shouldn’t say that. If God wants it.”
The bell rings: two toddlers hop into the kitchen. “Come here, I missed you!“The children hug Susan. The 74-year-old woman gives orders during cooking:” Water, more peppers, onion. Now, mix! ”
“She is like a mother for me,” says Susan on her way back home. “She sometimes does my laundry and often brings food.”
Just before midnight, Susan puts on her oxygen mask and goes to bed. She needs the mask because of anxiety complaints. Back to Ghana does not want Susan, even as illegality in the Netherlands. She takes a bag full of medicines from her bedroom cabinet. “I can get it here.” Just like the large white oxygen tank. “There are no medicines for me in Africa, I would die there.”