How Britain's migrant surge is devastating one Albanian town: Lonely single women. Abandoned wives. Children who barely know their fathers

Daily Mail​

10 hours ago

Besmira is a pretty young woman who spends day after day peering at her battered mobile phone hoping for a call from her husband, Arben, miles away in England.
The couple, both 32, are desperate for children together but their dream of becoming parents is still just that, a dream.
It is four years since Besmira, a former state statistician, has seen Arben in the flesh. In 2021, he left Albania to work in the UK, paying £5,000 for an illegal small boat Channel crossing from France.
He then headed to Liverpool to be a jobbing gardener, before settling in Manchester, where he is now a construction-site worker, sleeping in a small, rented room, and toiling 12 hours a day, six days a week to earn enough to send money home to his wife and their relatives.
Besmira is one of hundreds of women in Has, northern Albania, who are victims of an emigration phenomenon. Just as Arben did, their boyfriends or husbands have smuggled themselves into Britain because there is an unemployment crisis at home.
In 2022 alone, 13,000 Albanians – some just schoolboys – slipped illegally into the UK by boat in the belief that Britain is a land of milk and honey, with endless opportunities to make money (mainly on the black market).
At one stage, three years ago, nearly four in every ten migrants on the people-traffickers' Channel boats hailed from Albania and nowhere was the exodus higher than from Has, a municipality of just 5,000 people a three-hour drive north through the mountains from the capital Tirana.
Two years ago, the council put up a monument on the main square emblazoned with heart decorated with both the Union Flag and the Albanian flag, in a tribute to its extraordinary – not to say controversial – links to Britain. Pubs have the Union Flag painted on walls and coffee tables embossed with pictures of Big Ben.
An imposing statue of the late Queen Elizabeth II is being built to stand next to the town hall and, when she died, Has observed a day of mourning. On the face of it, this would appear to be a wonderful tribute from a small faraway community to a country that has provided so many of its citizens with productive work. But there have been devastating social consequences.
When teenage boys leave school, often refusing to enter the sixth form, they say goodbye to their teachers with the words, 'See you in London', instead of the more normal 'See you around'.
In the centre of Has, the girls wander around with nothing to do.
'They just chill all the time and look at their nails or mobile phones,' one bartender told me when I last visited.
'They don't need to work because their brothers send them money from England. Meanwhile, the boys they should be courting or marrying are all in England too.'
He's right. This week I watched teenage girls in Has's coffee bars sitting in groups all of the same sex. There were very few boys of their age visible during the 12 hours I was in the town.
The departure of so many men and boys has left behind a lopsided society where many heads of households are female, and even the council's road sweepers – traditionally a male job in Albania – are women.
Children grow up without fathers, whom they see only through the artificial prism of a Zoom lens in internet chats.
Besmira is only too familiar with this form of long-distance and soulless communication. 'I am depressed, like many of the women here left behind,' she says.
'Emigration of men destroys family bonds. Families are torn apart.
'The men who leave may forget the family they have here. There is an increase in divorces when there were once hardly any in our close-knit society. The town has been upended. There is money coming in, of course, sent from the UK. But money isn't everything.'
We are talking in the back room of a local cafe where Besmira refuses to have her photograph taken and asks the Mail to use pseudonyms for her and Arben as she is embarrassed about publicising her plight.
She has been introduced to us through a charity worker, who is concerned about the impact of the male exodus, not just in Has, but Albania generally.
In a further twist, and one I don't mention to Besmira, the men who leave sometimes find other partners in Britain, marry them bigamously, and simply disappear for ever. Besmira has thought of moving to the UK but the costs of smuggling herself in are impossibly high.
In its last two years, the Tory government cracked down on Channel boat crossings by Albanian economic migrants, deporting them as non-refugees back to their 'safe country' by plane.
As a result, Albanians now increasingly use lorries on Channel ferries to enter Britain illegally from France – and that is a much more expensive enterprise. A trafficker's ticket for this ride has spiralled to an enormous £22,000, I was told in Has this week.
'All the money my husband sends goes to his parents, whom I live with, or our other relatives whom he supports,' she says. 'There is none left for the journey to England.'
Besmira and Arben met in Has when both were 24, got married, and lived together for four years before he left. They love each other, she says. 'We want children, of course,' she adds, her dark eyes beginning to fill.
'We know we are missing out. The idea was he would come back but that never happens because of the money he needs to send us. There are no jobs for him in Albania.'
As Besmira leaves the cafe, I am joined by a local official who is setting up a 'tourist village', eight miles outside Has. Apart from helping to stem the exodus of young local men by offering them work, he hopes to lure back others who have gone abroad.
'There are 300 sunny days a year, so developing tourism is the future,' says Jahir Cahani, a 50-year-old former schoolteacher, who has witnessed first-hand the town's dramatic demographic change.
'The normal chain of boy meets girl, engagement, marriage, then children coming along, is broken,' he says.
'It is difficult for girls here to meet boys in the first place, to even start the chain. The boys are in the UK.'
At the table, too, is Professor Festim Danti, another former teacher. 'The men go and it is positive for the family's economic situation,' he explains.
'It is the opposite for the family unit. For teenage boys, it is a problem if they don't have a father figure here. They need a father and a mother to be raised properly and happily as good citizens.'
He points out that women shoulder the burden of raising children alone. But they have the extra responsibility of caring for their own parents, as is traditional in Albania. On top of this, they now look after their husband's parents too.
'It is too much for them,' he says. 'They are doing this enormous job that their husbands should be sharing with them.'
July is wedding season in Has and this is the time when the men who do have the right to remain in Britain – and can therefore fly back to Albania safe in the knowledge they can re-enter the UK legally – return to marry the girls they left behind.
This does not mean that, after the ceremony, their new brides will automatically be given the right to live in the UK.
In order to obtain a so-called 'spouse visa', they will need to satisfy various criteria, which include a minimum income threshold for the two of them.
So, there will be lots of form-filling ahead and, thanks to this Home Office red tape, many brides will not be able to follow their husbands back when they leave a few weeks after the wedding.
At Has's bridal shop, sales assistant Doriana Laci, 19, is very busy when I call in. 'When the boys leave school, they don't work here, they migrate,' she says.
'The girls I get coming here are nearly all alone or with a girlfriend. They are waiting for their grooms to arrive from England. At secondary school the girls with me in the sixth form found it hard to even find a boyfriend as they had all gone to work in Britain. These boys wanted to make money more than have a relationship.'
Doriana, who is studying medicine at university, adds with a toss of her head: 'I, myself, am single.'
She introduces me to her boss, a polite, bearded man in his early fifties, who refuses to be named.
When a young female customer arrives – alone – to try on a gown from the multicoloured selection that line the walls, he takes me outside. He co-owns the shop with his sister. 'The male migrants coming back on holiday have plenty of money to spend, so we do well when they return every summer to get married,' he says.
'They have their proper papers to work in Britain. They can return there, not like the illegal ones who don't come to marry, because once they are out of the UK, they are out.'
A family group of a grandmother, her two grown-up daughters and three children stop outside the wedding shop to say that they have many relatives, cousins, brothers, or uncles (although not husbands) in the UK.
'For a marriage to work you have to have the left hand, the woman, and the right hand, the man,' says one of the daughters, in her 30s. 'The right hand is often missing in an Albanian family now. The father is not there.'
Eight out of ten Has families rely on money for survival from men working in the UK. What is happening here is a microcosm of the demographic upheaval happening in other poorer countries, as men leave to find money, illegally or legally.
In Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea, thanks to a huge exodus to the UK, towns and villages have been emptied of their lifeblood of young men and boys. Now there are only women and girls left behind to run things, while looking after the older generation.
This week, I was told every Albanian town has a trafficking agent who, for the right money, will arrange to smuggle a boy or young man to England. They put the migrant on a visa flight to the EU, then organise a ride in a lorry on a ferry to Britain.
As I wandered through Has last week, I was pulled to one side by a young man called Edmir, who was waiting to have his hair cut at the barber's shop.
To my astonishment, he reminded me that we had met before. I had approached him at Tirana airport in November 2022 where he had arrived on a charter flight organised by the Home Office to deport 22 Albanian criminals and illegal migrants.
As the deportees walked from the airport, Edmir, now 29, agreed to talk. He had no criminal record but had been thrown out after nine years for working as a black-market builder and paying no taxes.
That November morning he explained he was broken-hearted to be back in Albania where he had no work or prospects. But if there is a sliver of hope for an Albania depleted of men, Edmir is it. He found a girlfriend soon after he returned.
They got engaged, then married in Has, and next month they expect their first baby.
'We will be a proper family but I miss the money I earned in the UK,' he admits ruefully, adding he doesn't have a steady job.
Besmira would understand his sentiment. After our interview, she trudged home to a life of dull chores looking after her husband's parents and her own mother and father. Depressed over losing her husband to England, she recently gave up her job as a town-hall demographer.
'I feel as though I am living life second-hand,' she said just before leaving me. 'Waiting and waiting for my husband is not good for my mental health or for that of the hundreds of other Has wives and girlfriends in my position.
'Whenever Arben is not working, we talk on the phone. But we are married, we love each other, we want to have a baby. Just having mobile calls over four years is not a real marriage, is it?'
It's hard to disagree.