I have a suspicion that almost every immigrant to the west is close to a horrendous story like this one. My family were immigrants to the west as well and also

I have a suspicion that almost every immigrant to the west is close to a horrendous story like this one. My family were immigrants to the west as well and also had a crossing-the-water story. Nothing happened, but friends had stories about falling into the water and having to swim. My oldest cousins still remember it. I acquired a teenage sister after turning 20, suddenly. A friend of the family brought her as the child of a woman he'd married, and was now divorcing, forcing them to return home. Turns out, she was not the child of this woman. My parents had a couple of days to decide to keep her, as the guy had decided to leave for the old country to look for another wife. This is not even the only terrible arrival in the West story in my own family, but I'll spare you the other one. I suspect if you go eat at certain ethnic restaurants in the major UK cities, you will meet someone with at most 2nd hand knowledge of sitting in the back of a truck going under the channel. When I investigated the immigration stories is friends, the most reasonable ones seem to be from parents or grandparents who came in the 60s or earlier. Sailors who happened to decide to stay in the West, that kind of thing. After that most of the stories are hairy. Escaping some regime, crossing water in a crappy boat, that type of thing. Not a whole lot of current dinghy-over-the-channel stories, but that mainly owes to my age.