Uran Ferizi is my kind of illegal immigrant.
Twenty-seven years after the penniless 15-year-old boy from Albania snuck into the United Kingdom clinging to the undercarriage of a truck ferried over the English Channel, Ferizi is now set to meet with King Charles.
Ferizi, 42, is Albania’s new ambassador to the U.K.
And he is now also rubbing shoulders with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and foreign Minister David Cameron.
How he got there from where he came from is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Ferizi grew up in Albania at a time when his parents lost most of their savings—as hundreds of thousands of Albanians did—when unregulated Ponzi schemes swept the country in 1997.
People who lost money rioted against the government and toppled it. Armories were raided and some 2,000 people were killed before the UN authorized a 7,000-member armed force to enter the country and restore order.
A year later Ferizi was in Belgium planning to sneak into the U.K. as thousands of other young Albanians have done, many of whom ended up in prison on drug charges.
But before he got there, and eventually into the U.K. and how he did it is an astonishing story of perseverance and survival.
The story was first told by U.K. Journalist Alsadair Palmer in “The Spectator’ who got to know Ferizi.
It begins with Ferizi’s impossible dream of going to the University of Oxford, something his father told him he could never achieve.
With the help of family and friends, Ferizi paid smugglers for a spot on a small, overcrowded clandestine boat from the Albania coast to Italy. The Adriatic Sea was turbulent. A companion boat sank, and everyone drowned. The teenager did not find out about the deaths until he called home. His mother thought he had been among the dead.
Dodging Italian patrols, the smugglers forced everyone overboard off the Brindisi coast and Ferizi was forced to swim ashore. Once on land he walked six hours to get to Brindisi. Told he could take a taxi to Milan, he paid a taxi driver the last of his money only to be let off at the Brindisi train station.
Cold and broke, he met an Italian lady who took pity on him and bought him a train ticket to Milan. From Milan Ferizi secretly boarded a train to Antwerp, Belgium during which he was protected from ticket collectors by a group of sympathetic fellow passengers.
Ferizi stayed with a cousin in Antwerp for three weeks. From there he studied how to sneak on trucks in coastal Ostend that were headed for the U. K.
He somehow avoided security and sniffer dogs and crawled under a truck headed for Dover. Once there Ferizi, still a minor, was eligible for social services, He was given some money and a place to stay. But he wanted to go to Oxford.
He took a train to London and found a job washing dishes in a Greek restaurant. He took evening classes and worked on his English. He also met an English woman who he married. After taking entrance examinations he applied to Oxford and took the college’s math test, passed and was told he could study engineering.
But Ferizi, still an illegal immigrant, could not attend Oxford until his immigration status was regularized. When he went to immigration officials he was told that they could deport him back to Albania. However, after he showed them his acceptance letter from Oxford and what it meant, they relented and allowed him to remain in the U.K to attend Oxford.
Ferizi not only graduated from Oxford but became a mathematician and computer scientist. He worked as a financial analyst at JP Morgan in London between 2006 and 2008 before moving to the U.S. where he worked as a scientific researcher at universities in New York and California.
Ferizi returned to the U.K and became a British citizen, something he must now temporarily renounce as Albania’s ambassador to London.
However, he has been assured that he can reapply once his time as ambassador comes to an end.
Not a bad for a one-time illegal immigrant.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.
