Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Dirty Pretty Things

When we imagine London we automatically see beautiful places in our head. Big Ben. London Eye. Tower of London. Tower Bridge. The Parliament. Piccadilly Circus. Whatever. For us this is London, an amazing city with tons of amazing places. Many dream to come here for living or just for holidays. But for others this dream is a nightmare.
In hope for a better life, many people come to London. But it gets complicated when you are an illegal immigrant.
Always running away from the police, illegal immigrants have to work clandestine many hours a day or have a couple of jobs to earn some money to buy their documents to be a normal citizen. However documents are very expensive and they receive very low salaries.
These men and women live in permanently danger, they are blackmailed every time by their bosses, if they are hurt they cannot go to the hospital, if they have kids they cannot attend school, they cannot use public services and they hardly have food to eat. Women are even in a harder position, once they are sexually abused, and they cannot do anything about it.
Many of these clandestine immigrants are so desperate that they don’t mind to swap a kidney for a forged passport. Organ trade is one of the main business of the Black Market, dealers get a lot of money by selling inner organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys. So they “help” illegal immigrants in getting them a false passport, but immigrants have to give them a kidney or another organ. As these operations cannot be found, they are not performed in hospitals; instead people do them under careless ways. This may result in complicated infections for the clandestine people, or even their death.
If you want to become aware of this reality and realize how terrible this situation is, I suggest you to watch the movie ‘Dirty Pretty Things’, which tells a story of two illegal immigrants, a Nigerian man and a Turkish woman, who live in London and who face horrible atrocities. I must say that I got inspired in this movie to write this article, although I’m perfectly conscious that this not only happens in London, but all over the world. 

2 comments:

  1. A imigração ilegal é mesmo algo horrível, tanto em Londres como um pouco por todo o Mundo...

    Beijinho*

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  2. Those who are planning to go anywhere in the world illegally and will watch this movie, they'll surely have second thoughts!

    A good review hun! :)

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