Hussain: Hi you guys. So they tell me you want to talk to a real live refugee? Here I am! My name's Hussain.

Megan: Cool. I'm Megan, this is John and Bal.

Bal: So, yeah, what we wanted to know was, when you get here, what happens at first, y’know, when you first arrive?

Hussain: It was my Dad who came first, he got accepted as a refugee then we were allowed to join him – my Mum and me. My elder brother couldn’t escape and…. Well, we’ve never heard from in five years so…..

Bal: Did you start school straight away?

Hussain: Pretty much. My Dad had tried to fix it up before I came…

Megan: Did he get a job?

Hussain: He wasn’t allowed to! He had a decent job in an office in Zaire (it’s called Congo now); he speaks and writes English and French, but if you’re a refugee you’re not allowed to work until you’re given permission to stay in the country. He says it took 8 months.

Megan: How did he manage then?

Hussain: You get some money, but don't believe it if anyone tells you it's a lot. Then you had vouchers so you could get butter and stuff from the shops. The money is very little, and having the vouchers shows everyone in the shop you’re a refugee and y’know, some people feel really ashamed about that, but my Dad says he didn’t really mind. He was glad to be alive and was too worried about me and my Mum to care about anything else. He had to report to the police, and he was found some place to live.

Megan: But you hear about refugees just disappearing….

Hussain: He couldn’t afford to break any of the rules because he was wanting to get us to safety. I’m sure there are people who wait for months to get ‘legal’ without being allowed to work or anything, then get just fed up and take off. I dunno what they do, how they get work.

Megan: ‘Spose they work illegally….

Claire: Yeah, some work illegally, always in low paid jobs of course. They take a big risk if they work at anything where they might get hurt, like if they get burnt in a kitchen. They’d be scared of questions at the hospital.

Megan: Do you think there are lots of people working illegally?

Claire: I don’t know, what’s lots? Of course there are some. It’s risky, but less risky than whatever they’ve escaped from.

Hussain: When we came my Dad had to find somewhere else to live, so we still couldn’t be together for a while. But by that time he’d been given permission to be here…. so he had a job.

Megan: What sort of a job?

Hussain: He was an office cleaner, working at night. He still is, actually.

Bal: So what about when people say refugees shouldn’t be allowed in because they take people’s jobs?

Hussain: You don’t mess about do you? You don’t ask the nice polite questions.

Bal: Well, look, I was born in Britain, but all my life I’ve heard people say that my family’s taken British people’s jobs. People say to me ‘go back to your own country’ so I just know they’re gonna say it to you.

Hussain: Yeah, they do. I don’t think my Dad is taking anyone’s job. He gets the lowest wages possible, he works at night, and everyone else he works with is an immigrant or a refugee. I don’t see white British people lining up to get jobs like that. He’s doing the kind of job British people don’t want to do.