The immigrant’s experience of Europe

Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his arm.

In Ben Judah’s illuminating depiction of modern-day Europe, almost everyone has a dream. Of the 23 personal narratives around which This Is Europe is built (each character gets his or her own chapter), almost half belong to refugees. The remainder herald from the peripheries, either geographic (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia’s frozen north) or socio-economic (poor, low-skilled, rural).