Shades of Risk

Suppose I give up trying to find work in the UK and head for Rio, where I work illegally, earning cash for export, until I am gunned down by Brazilian police who mistake me for a local favela gangster. Big international story? Hundreds of ex-pat Brits marching on the streets of Brasilia demanding justice? Don't think so.

When the media have finished milking the story of the cruel death of an innocent migrant worker on the London Underground, our Latin American community may come to regret the extra exposure that this incident has afforded them. The Brazilians in particular have been riding their luck a bit over the past decade or so.

Indeed, in being taken for an Islamic terrorist Jean Charles de Menezes fell foul of the kind of discrimination that London's latins have generally been immune to. Xenophobic rants about 'asylum seekers' or more positive discourse about multiculturalism have thus far largely been targeted mainly at Asian and African communities.

At around 100,000, the capital's Brazilian population is now half that of its Jewish population, the latter having been around for a lot longer in those sort of numbers. Many are young and single and enter as students of English, before drifting into unskilled and semi-skilled employment - like blocking the flow of pavement traffic on Oxford Street whilst holding up a sign to the nearest Pizza Hut.

Jean Charles de Menezes was in some senses implicitly already a fugitive, having taken a calculated risk in remaining beyond his technical welcome. I've witnessed incidents in Miami involving Cubans and armed Immigration officials, and can report that the risks of economic migrancy are not to be snorted at. (I know of an Ecuadorian lady that was brusquely accosted by police on Oxford Street a few years ago and deported the next day. She's back now though, having discovered that it's easier to re-enter via Scotland, and I think she's been here long enough now to avoid a repeat eviction.)

These sort of international workers are taking economic advantage of the melting pot far more explicitly than many of the asylum-seekers that the Daily Mail so abhors. (Though they are probably less likely to end up as part of a gang of professional benefits spongers.) They have profited from a comparative lenience on the part of the Home Office, for whom they have probably not been foreign (or dark) enough as a group to create serious anxiety. Last Friday though, de Menezes was just dark enough to die.