This is a suggestion for changing the rules if residency and for a rational solution to immigration in Europe . Recently i was in germany where i found the laws of immigration where incredibly different from other countries in europe (where i had spent all my youth). Infact i have always thought that i should go to the European court and make my case heard .... but disinformation and populism are a sort of conspiracy which has paved the way all along , not only for me but for other people who have similar stories and experiences. In 2004 i met Teresita; a woman from Colombia who had lived in Florence for 50 years and she had no recognition from the state and her italian friend Rino asked Silvia who is a catholic to look after her when she finally fell ill at the age of seventy. She couldnt recieve any health care or any sort of help from public institutions , she had always worked and had been paid under the counter like a lot of others .... charity from friends was all she had but that meant burdening people who already had their own issues.
I only think that the future should be better for the new generation of immigrants .... meanwhile i want to publicly write of my situation so that people will know there is a lot of negativity in Populism and it only benefits the shady people who enjoy benefiting from feudal attitudes .... Germany should be taken as an example in its way of treating people fairly.
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My name is Nilofar Mehrin i am a painter and illustrator and have lived and worked in Italy and today i have a refugee status in France but i have lived in Florence Italy legally with a regular stay permit for 23 years from 1982 to 2005......
I was a student at the university of Florence and after my BA in 92 i created a small freekance buisiness. In 1998 i had started up a Gallery shop with the help of a Gallery called DEA in the university area.
I kept this Atelier till 2004 and then was working as an aupair in Viareggio for some months. From here i had to go back to Iran after 26 years of living in Europe .
My mother was ill and my brother who was looking after her needed help. He had returned from the US after having lived there for seven years. Unfortunately my brother passed away from a heart attack after i had been back for a month or two and i had to look after my mother on my own. My mother passed away after some years and i had tried to get residency in Spain by buying a property there. This didnt work out for me .
While i was on my way to Italy ( an Italian friend had suggested that i should take the bus there) i was taken at the border of Spain and France because my tourist visa had expired.
In France i was taken to a Detention center and had to stay there for three months while the judge decided if i could stay in France . I had to ask for asylum because that was the only way i could stay on in Europe.
At the detention center which was close to Toulouse i met a lot of people like myself who had expired visas and documents. we were all waiting for the court to decide if they would give us asylum.
There was even a woman who lived in Paris with her family and there had been American woman who had expired documents . I was told this by the very helpful social worker Mathilde.... she told me that the border agents were very strict on this issue here, Mathilde and her team at association for helping Asylum seekers were people who gave people advice about how we could deffend our rights. She was a law student and she was the one who accompanied me through the various phases. I was in this center for three months ... and went to see the judge twice but there were lucky people who got to leave the place quickly because they had friends or family who worked to get them out.
I had to ask for a a political refugee status even though i had never thought of getting into any such thing. I had never been politically involved
In the book i had published in the UK in 2013 about my artistic path . I had mentioned that i had had issues with selling my property in Tehran, some of these were associated with the surveillance system which i felt was hindering me from selling my inheritence as i thought was best. It took me three years to untangle the complications which were invisible and shouldnt have exsisted in the first place. In Tehran i discovered that a lot of families were in the same situation. Their properties were tangled up in unbelievable legal issues which were excuses to fuel waiting for years and consequently poverty.
It was obviously political ... some one wanted people to pay a percentage on the sales (to who ever was eligible for the power planning behind the scenes) . I was entangled with a man from the southern area of Iran. It had obviously been planned and i had to bring this man to court because i didnt know that i simply needed to pay him to get out of their game. His job was to tricn people and hinder the process of sale and slow it down .... consequently he would refuse to pay up and wanted his deposit back. After having lost some good opportunities and much better clients i had to take him to court. But i found out that the court was on his side because he was an insider and it was a game ...... Like a lot of the population of the country i was innocent and a prey and didnt know what was going on.....
I had written in my book "A Time For Dreamers" about my experiences in Tehran as well as in Italy... perhaps that was why i was the only person in that detention center to get a stay permit.
One of the girls i met in the detention center was from Nigeria and called Beauty. She was a very attractive girl who had just landed in the center. She was very naive because she started to sweep the room as if it were her house and she was enjoying it as if she had finally found a home to clean.
She asked me if there was any cleaning liquid foe cleaning the bathroom, it was as if we were staying in a residency. We were staying in a very modern and clean and well heated building which as Mathilde said "was a prison for the illegals " .
Beauty told me that her father had sold the last of his belongings inorder to send her to Europe. He had told her, do what it takes to survive, because this is not a place for a nice girl like you. She had no idea about what she was about to step into. I had met another gorgeous african girl called Naomi who told me that when she was in Spain , she had some Spanish men who had wanted to protect her by marrying her. She spoke perfect Spanish and she knew she had a choice because she was only twenty five and poor but very attractive. She had friends, she knew the secret laws and was street smart.
Painting on the subject of Paris. I reached this metropolis in 2013 where i tried to make my way in the art scene....
Painting on the subject of Paris. I reached this metropolis in 2013 where i tried to make my way in the art scene....
Later on when i had reached Paris i met and shared a room with a woman from another African country who had run away from home because she said that her brother in law had wanted to marry her when her husband died .... it was a biblical law but she didnt want to do it. . Back in the center for illegals i had met other women. These women i met were pregnant and my friendly social worker told me that there were entire families with children waiting at the center for the judge to decide what they should do. I was happy to leave the center when the three months were over and i had to start my life in the south of France. That was a very frightning experience because there seemed to be people who were preying on people like myself because i had a right to have a monthly salary . Infact for some time i was not given my salary simply because i didnt know that there was a lot of paper work to be done before one reached any of ones rights as a refugee. I had to find another social worker who would show me how to fill in the papers in french.I was happy to know italian because that was an acceptable language for folks in Southern France..
It was a first hand experience of how populists dont want to allow refugees to live
and are anarchists who decide what they want to do regardless of the laws.
It was a first hand experience of how populists dont want to allow refugees to live
and are anarchists who decide what they want to do regardless of the laws.
Populism wanted to help out its own friends even at the cost of going against the french laws for refugees.
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