It is after six o’clock on a sunny June evening in Luton, a town 30 miles north of London, UK, in 2013. I am in a downstairs room of a small dilapidated Victorian terraced house on a street where many houses have boarded-up windows. Two social workers, Sarah and Rodney, are sitting on chairs near the doorway that separates this small room from the other downstairs room, which is being used a bedroom. Catalina, a migrant mother from Romania who arrived four months earlier with her family to find work, sits on her low stool next to the kitchen. Her long skirt flows onto the floor. She has seven children who were born in Stuttgart, Brussels and Buenos Aires. Radu, her husband, sits opposite her with the best view of the kitchen, the back door, and of the large TV, precariously placed on a window sill, that is playing Nicolae Guţă, a popular Manele Romanian singer. Radu is smoking a cigarette and has half a bottle of white wine next to him. They all have Argentinean identity (ID) cards. I am perched on the leather couch close to Radu, joined by two of their five sons. Catalina and Radu's two daughters intermittently shuffle past the feet and bags that are blocking their path to the kitchen. Paula, an equality and diversity officer for the children's services department, sits on a hard wooden chair close to Catalina. Catalina's grandson, who was born in London, can be heard crying upstairs from one of the two bedrooms where her daughter-in-law, Sophia, a refugee from Romania, is nursing him. She is the only one in the family who has this status and she does not have an Argentinean ID card. The family does not speak English.

We have all been sitting in this room for what seems like 20 minutes but it could have been longer. It is cramped and there are long silences between people talking, creating a tense atmosphere. I purposively stay silent unless asked a direct question from someone. Sarah – the social worker – breaks one of the silences. “How can they be here? How can they live here without access to anything?” She doesn't seem to be directly addressing any of the eight of us sitting in the small room. She looks dismayed at the Argentinean ID cards in front of her.