According to community leader Lesley Katsande, the five people brought over from Rwanda by former minister Philip Ozouf to illegally work in his house and laundrette “knew absolutely nothing” about the key infrastructural systems at play in Jersey…
Mrs Katsande believes that the Rwandan workers had arrived in the Island fundamentally under-prepared for a socio-economic landscape “vastly different” to the one they’d left more than 4,000 miles behind.
Ozouf’s victims, on her account, are far from an anomaly: the government “has never done enough” to make Jersey’s bafflingly opaque immigration and visa system more digestible for workers coming from abroad.
This gap in understanding has prompted the creation of a potentially paradigm-shifting new platform; one that Mrs Katsande hopes will empower prospective residents with the kind of information never previously relayed to multiple generations of migrant workers.
Inform Me
It is called ‘Inform Me’, and has been developed with painstaking attention-to-detail by the Friends of Africa charity, in collaboration with other stakeholders.
Funded by a Jersey Community Foundation grant, the platform provides interested parties with an extensive list of resources across the Island’s healthcare, housing, finance and immigration systems.
People considering the life-changing move across the world can also use ‘Inform Me’ to receive real-time advice from volunteers based in Jersey via the app’s ‘feedback’ tab.
Speaking to Express, Mrs Katsande said the resource was designed to help prospective workers “from 60 days before that person leaves home”.
“You’ve found that job, you’ve had your interview, then you’ve got the job – but then what happens after that? That’s why we started from those 60 days before,” she explained.
The charity leader said the app “touches on a lot of different systems and departments”, and aims to answer questions regarding next of kin, beneficiaries, wills, health insurance, visas, housing restrictions, medication and more.
“People don’t realise that most of the time they are here to fill jobs that the locals don’t want to do anymore”
‘Inform Me’ can be downloaded on any Android or Apple phone, and the charity hopes that Jersey Customs & Immigration Service will “be able to send the link to anybody who has applied for a visa to come to Jersey”.
“Other countries in the world do that,” Mrs Katsande pointed out. “They will send you a welcome pack before you even set off, so I do not see why Jersey cannot do that.”
Mrs Katsande, who is from Zimbabwe and has lived in Jersey for over thirteen years, says the app will help dispel lingering misconceptions of the Island.
“Remember”, she laughed, “people think they are moving to the UK, and everybody is watching Bridgerton or other very British films where life is presented as very upper-middle class.
“People don’t realise that most of the time they are here to fill jobs that the locals don’t want to do anymore.
“That means even if you were upper middle class back home, you are now going to be right at the bottom: minimum wage, poor housing, different schools, different languages, different cultures.
“That misconception normally comes from the different systems not being explained properly, or people being brainwashed at times.”
The app will help people to understand the system, to build a picture, and to even have more questions when they are being interviewed
Lesley katsande
The ‘Inform Me’ platform, she said, will help prevent migrant workers from feeling “stuck” in Jersey.
“The most important thing – for both those who want to stay and those who are here – is how do you make their lives better? How do you make this their home? How do you make this enjoyable? And how do you make them feel like they are true Jersey residents?”.
Mrs Katsande is unsympathetic to the view – expressed by several people in the wake of Philip Ozouf’s sentencing for assisting unlawful immigration – that it is beholden on the workers themselves to learn how to live and work in Jersey.
“I found from speaking to some of the victims that they didn’t even realise what was happening, even from the day they landed – they didn’t know what their visas meant,” she explained.
“Somebody would say, ‘but they’re supposed to do their own research!’, and I would ask that person if they’ve ever lived in Africa.
“For some of these young people, internet data is not always easily available, hence why WhatsApp is a big tool in Africa, because it doesn’t consume so much internet data.
“So to expect them to open the immigration policy, and the immigration legislation, on the internet and read about it, is not fair.”
“It is a solution to something that the government should have done a long time ago”
Mrs Katsande hopes, therefore, that ‘Inform Me’ will provide a much-needed bridge between workers, the government, employers, unions and even recruitment agencies.
“The app will help people to understand the system, to build a picture, and to even have more questions when they are being interviewed”, she argued.
“Or, they can simply just interact on the app and ask us questions, which we can respond to.”
She is firmly of the belief that Jersey will be in a “stronger position” when its migrant population feel understood, valued and empowered.
“This is a solution, it is not a problem,” Mrs Katsande reflected. “It is a solution to something that the government should have done a long time ago.
“I strongly believe that it will lessen a lot of workload on the government’s immigration officers, who at times are doing a job that this app can do.”
With regards to Ozouf’s victims, the ‘Inform Me’ co-developer is clear.
“I think we could have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache,” she told. “And we could have saved the government and the taxpayers a lot of money.”
