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Catalin Dobrisan

I will miss you so much.

Anna Dobrisan

(Speaks Romanian)

Catalin

(Speaks Romanian)

Commentary

Catalin left his family in Romania to start a new life for them all as a taxi driver in Plymouth.

Catalin

I’m ready to start work I hope we have a nice day from now on.

Commentary

But the reception he got wasn’t always friendly.

Catalin

The clients said that I came here to England to get their jobs and so English guys don’t have jobs anymore.

I told them, well you take my car and you start driving around. So it’s Saturday night you take the car and drive around. Pick up all the people that are drunk or they want to go back home from parties and different places and you drive them around.

So I’m not taking anybody’s jobs. If the foreign workforce from this country would leave then this country would be in serious problems.

There are foreign people working in nursing homes and many, many other places for a minimum wage for salary and these people are simple satisfied with what they get doing a really hard work and still there’s so many people despising them for that. And I wonder why?

They have this idea that we’ve, or that I’ve come into this country to claim benefits from the government, which is totally not true. I’m here to work, and also to get a good education and I’m paying tax as much as everybody else.

The ideas that they have about some of us foreign workers here are many times in error because they don’t have the full idea, the full picture of why we’re here, what we’re doing here. What are our intentions here and everything else.

I’ve learned to deal with this situations and er I’ve also started to feel whether a customer is comfortable with the fact that I’m a foreign person working in this country or not.