Marc Prüst

The Road Less Travelled – Why people leave home to live illegally in Europe

“Fakhredinne is a 28-year-old migrant from Morocco who lives illegally in Brussels. His story runs counter to the popular idea of why people leave home for a better future in another country. In many ways Fakhredinne fits the stereotyped image of an illegal immigrant: a young Moroccan who has come to Europe to build a new life and earn money for his family back home.

But Fakhredinne’s life in Brussels is miserable. He suffers from Crohn’s disease – an inflammatory disease of the intestines, which in his case is accompanied by epileptic seizures and psychiatric problems. When I met him, he and 650 other migrants were occupying a building and on hunger strike to pressurize the Belgium authorities to push through their cases, but Fakhredinne had been ejected from the building after an episode of uncontrolled behavior. For a time he lived in a tiny room in a basement near the city center. Lacking any income, he was sometimes forced to steal for food. It was a big question mark for me why he ever left Morocco.

After meeting Fakhredinne, I decided to seek out his family in Morocco and found them to be fairly middle class, not poor at all, warm and full of love, with no lack of food or other material things. So why did he leave? Life in Morocco is not that bad, his life in Brussels is absolutely terrible, so why is Fakhredinne not going back?

Fakhredinne’s family say he was unable to cope with the realities at home, traumatized by the divorce of his mother and alcoholic father, and that he even attempted to commit suicide. His mother’s new husband considers him a dropout and a junk, and apparently does not want him to return. Medicines for Crohn’s disease are hard to find in Morocco and prohibitively expensive. This is not just as we consider the classic migration story. It is a universal story about the consequences of a traumatic childhood, the impact of a family history, which can take place at any time in all cultures. Each individual has his or her own way of coping”.

Personal motivations of migration

After working on the story of Fakhredinne and his family, Dirk-Jan will continue to investigate personal motivations of migration and the consequences of living in illegality. The current socio-political debate in many countries in the European Union focuses on issues of migration and integration. The debate makes the individual person disappear in statistics and figures. The debate focuses exclusively on the situation within the Union, and leaves out the people it concerns: the migrants themselves. This project will lift the veil from the unknown migrant stories, and will reveal the diversity of reasons why people choose to live a life of illegality in Europe.

Dirk-Jan will find several illegal migrants living in the European Union, he is particularly interested in getting to know these people, documenting their every day lives. Meanwhile he will investigate where they come from and reflect their story from here to the stories told by family and friends from the country of origin. Covering the stories of 5 individuals, Dirk-Jan has teamed up with project manager and curator Marc Prüst to create from these 5 stories a comprehensive traveling exhibition and accompanying publication.

The first part of the project, the story of Fakhredinne was produced for the World Press Photo Masterclass, in which Dirk-Jan Visser participated in November 2009. The production of the project has been made possible with the support of Fonds BKVB, the Netherlands.

More info: www.marcprust.com and www.dirkjanvisser.com

Text on Fakhredinne courtesy Rodney Bolt / World Press Photo