U-Turn

For Mariam and Yahya, much of the difficulty had its roots in a failure of European bureaucracy. When, in early March, they fled Kharkiv, they at first experienced a surge of hope. They were allowed across the Polish border into Germany along with many other thousands of refugees, Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian alike. They received a warm welcome at Berlin’s central station, and were told how to get free train tickets by Julia Damphouse, who has been helping coordinate the thousands of refugees turning up at the station every day. They planned to go to Rome, and were looking forward to it — though Yahya knew nobody in the country, Mariam had a sister in central Italy, which was something. They obtained the free fare and were able to board a train there without trouble.

This all gave them the impression that they would be afforded the same rights as Ukrainian nationals: a one-year guarantee of residency in any EU country if they had long-term Ukrainian residency permits. At the start of the crisis, the EU had deployed emergency powers to override the 1990 Dublin Agreement, which requires refugees present their claims at the first EU country they enter; instead Ukrainians would be given relative free travel around the bloc.

Efforts to extend these rights to non-Ukrainians fell flat in the European Council after pressure from the Visegrád Group, a group of countries bordering Ukraine that includes Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Other European countries, including Italy, followed suit. Instead of being given a temporary waiver, non-Ukrainians resident in Ukraine would have to prove that going home would put them in danger, or else go through the arduous, years-long process of applying for general asylum.

What this meant, exactly — and whether these refugees would ultimately be granted asylum — would be at the discretion of the host country. That left a lot of ambiguity; Damphouse recalled one Egyptian refugee who was protected by Ukraine but didn’t know if she would qualify elsewhere. It’s a judgment that’s entirely in the eye of the beholder, said Steve Peers, an expert on EU law. “It’s a bit vague as to how someone can show that they can’t return safely,” he said. “If you’re a Moroccan student, how do you prove you’re unsafe in Morocco?”

As a result, the two Moroccans found rejection and confusion around every corner: at first from the Ukrainian church, then elsewhere, repeatedly. It turned out their initial success had more to do with a failure on the part of border officials to apply the correct rules in the chaos of the original mass evacuation. Damphouse, for instance, encountered a large number of non-Ukrainians in the first few days, she said, but that has since dwindled to a thin trickle, and she suspects that’s because the rules have since been tightened, leaving those who did make it through initially, like Mariam and Yahya, in a kind of awkward limbo.

It might not seem obvious why people from countries that are not sufficiently perilous can’t just go home — why, say, Mariam and Yahya cannot simply return to Morocco. They have homes there, families, and the country isn’t “war-torn” by any measurable standard. But neither is it particularly prosperous or safe, at least compared with Western Europe. Human rights like freedom of speech are consistently violated, and Mariam noted that there are few job prospects. Kharkiv, where she was studying pharmacy, looked like a glittering metropolis by comparison. Why should hopeful young people who came to Europe in search of a better life have to abandon these hopes on account of Putin’s invasion?

Even sensible concessions — such as letting non-Ukrainians stay with already resident family members, as Mariam hoped to do — are either not permitted or are permitted at random, noted Damphouse. She said that many refugees from Ukraine have little connection to the places they are being told to return to. “They left these places for a reason,” she said.

General Injustice

After their experience at the Ukrainian church, Mariam and Yahya headed to the Sant’Egidio shelter in Trastevere, in the heart of Rome. They hoped to find brief accommodation or at least some advice. One of the main organizers at the shelter, a kindly man in his seventies, made calls to various government agencies dealing with the crisis: he soon managed to get Yahya on a waiting list for a room in one of several shelters available. But it was far from guaranteed: he was one-thousandth on the list. Another volunteer was downright suspicious of Yahya, and openly dismissed him as an economic migrant — as an opportunist. It was a pattern that would become bleakly recurrent: even when they were presumed to have the right to stay, they were treated with hostility.

After multiple attempts, they finally connected with the previously unresponsive emergency refugee hotline and were told to go to a police station inside Rome’s central station, where the polizia ferroviaria, the railroad police, would help Yahya find a place. Despite the operator’s assurances, this all seemed surprising; they had expected the crisis to be in the purview of not the Italian police but the civil protection agency, which is responsible for managing crises, as it did with COVID-19.

Immediately upon arrival, Mariam and Yahya were seriously worried they had walked into a trap. Joined by two grim-faced armed guards, the police escorted them to a tiny, windowless office situated in a remote nook of Rome’s central station, Termini. Yahya was subjected to intense interrogation and cross-reference: How many trains had they taken from Kharkiv? Where were their work permits? Had they tested negative for COVID?

At first the officers said they would only question Yahya, but before long they turned to Mariam, too. They sweated her for details, yelled unintelligible questions in quick succession, asked her to provide her phone number, her sister’s address, her full name, her identity card. They proliferated byzantine excuses to keep her on edge, telling her at one point she needed to procure a negative COVID test to leave the office. As a foreigner that would cost her €400, they warned; if she couldn’t afford it they could neither let her stay nor leave. When a bystander remarked that a test would only cost €15 in any pharmacy, they folded and sent her off to get one, dispatching the armed guards to flank her as she did so.

Yahya and Mariam were comparatively lucky. Already across Ukraine’s frontier there have been reports of non-white refugees facing appalling abuse and discrimination. Many, for instance, have been summarily pushed back from the Ukrainian borders while Ukrainian citizens have been let through. At the Polish border, far-right groups have beaten African refugees openly. It’s an echo of the chaos last year, when Belarus retaliated against EU sanctions by encouraging large numbers of migrants to cross over into the EU: many were met with swiftly erected fences and violent pushbacks at the hands of Polish and Lithuanian border guards. Others were simply left to die in the freezing cold.

A Future Unknown

For an hour and a half in the police station, Mariam and Yahya waited and listened as the police discussed their futures, arguing among themselves in hushed voices in a bolted office. Finally, the door swung open, and it was good news: the officers had found Yahya a place. It wasn’t clear how they had skirted the rules: maybe the officers had taken pity on them, they wondered, or maybe the rules had been quietly changed. Peers, the EU law expert, said that in the heat of large crises, important decisions are often left to the private whims of individuals, in this case immigration officials, and those decisions may be subsequently overturned as rules become more clear, dashing any hopes briefly stirred.

And so, the squat police chief lumbered from his office and told Yahya that he had been assigned to a refuge in the expansive nothingness of the northern Lazio countryside, a place run by volunteers and nuns. The civil protection agency, he said, would be arriving shortly to transport him there.

Would Yahya have time to pick up his stuff from the hotel? The police chief scoffed: “We are not a hotel service!”

As the car arrived to pick Yahya up, Mariam bid him a tearful goodbye and watched as he settled in for a long journey into the unknown. It was a long, surreal trip through the outer peelings of Rome, then the Lazio countryside, and it took an hour. At last he arrived at the place, an expansive, paradisiacal complex with a chapel, meticulously tended gardens, clean dormitories, and a large dining room serving three hot meals a day, all closed off to the outside world by a heavy iron gate. The place was already full of refugees. Most were Ukrainian, but others were from North Africa and the Middle East.

When asked about these refugees’ futures, staff at the shelter took on a sad look. They could only offer accommodation for a limited period, after which the refugees would be dispersed at random around the country, as with the hundreds of Afghans who stayed in the shelter the previous year. According to an activist at an Italian refugee charity, the current occupants will be sent first to hotels in big cities like Rome and Milan that have made short-term deals with the government. They will then be shifted to smaller, provincial cities like Pomezia and Viterbo, at the onset of tourism season.

For Yahya, life at the refuge quickly became dull. For weeks, he found himself sitting around listlessly, bored out of his mind, too far from Rome to look for work, receiving little help from the volunteers. He had no work permit, anyway, and wanted no part in Italy’s vast and exploitative black economy. As predicted, he soon became lonely, too, as everyone else gradually left. Except him.

At around the same time, Mariam arrived at her sister’s place in northern Italy, and within days received a call from the police. They wanted her to go to the local station to discuss her residency. She turned up, expecting a breeze through the usual formalities, but instead there was bad news: she wouldn’t be given long-term residency, the police told her, because her country was not at war. Neither, it seemed, could they give it to Yahya. Mariam spoke to a lawyer and was told she may qualify for political asylum, which would give them both six months. After that, who knows.