THE REAL COST OF JAPA: worth an hour before you move

Someone sent me this round-table from Femi Lazarus's channel. Nigerians who moved to the UK talking about what it actually cost them. I watched it in one sitting and recognised more of it than I expected.

What comes up:

• Almost none of them regret leaving, and several still went through a stretch of real regret early on. Both things are true at once, which is the honest part.
• The work. Twelve-hour shifts in care homes, 48 hours a week, chronic back pain, insomnia, a hoist battery dropped on someone's foot. Kitchen porter shifts and waste-truck runs while finishing a master's.
• What keeps them there anyway: you get paid on time, and the work is treated as work. One of them contrasts that with salaries going unpaid for months back home.
• Skills beat certificates. The people who found their footing fastest had something practical they could sell, not just the degree they arrived with.
• Black tax. Every pound sent home is somebody standing in the cold at the end of a double shift, and the people receiving it mostly cannot see that part.

Fair warning that it is entirely about the UK, so the visa rules, the hourly rates and the work limits in it are British. The money arithmetic does not transfer to Portugal. The emotional arithmetic mostly does.

If you are still deciding, watch it before you go, not after.