In Kukes the absences are palpable. Bars are mostly empty. At one school teenage girls told me that there was no one to take them to the prom because their classmates were all in Britain. “It’s like the boys have gone extinct,” said a young woman in a nearby village. There are hardly any mechanics left in town, Billa said – you have to fix everything yourself.
Smugglers used to charge £18,000 to take Albanians across the channel. In June 2022 people noticed anonymous ads popping up in their TikTok feeds, which offered to ferry people on a small boat for as little as £4,000
Those who remain watch their friends’ lives in London play out on their phones. Influencers who have made the crossing post videos on TikTok of themselves driving past Big Ben in expensive cars. Albania was the most economically isolated of the old eastern-bloc economies. Western clothing brands weren’t available, and ordinary citizens were not even allowed to own cars, which may explain their outsized status in Albanian culture today. In the video for Vinz’s ode to gang life, “My Shqipez” (“My Albanians”), the camera lingers lovingly on the badges of the crew’s cars – Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, McLaren – in between shots of London council estates and the Millennium Dome.
One of Kukes’s biggest social-media stars is a man called Aleks Vishaj. It’s not clear when Vishaj first came to Britain, but he was reported to have been deported in 2021. He managed, somehow, to re-enter the country and now posts videos of himself to his 35,000 followers, driving around the world in his black Ferrari, drinking in nightclubs and hanging out in luxury hotels. This spring he drove it through the streets of Kukes. Billa’s nephews, who are seven and 11, were keen to meet him and get a selfie, like every other kid in town. Neither has spoken explicitly about moving to Britain, but Billa is afraid it is coming.
“They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social-media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,” he said. Billa drives a battered Ford Focus that is more than 20 years old. He worries the example he sets can’t compete with the one promoted by videos on social media. But, he noted, “they don’t tell the darker story.”
Everyone in Kukes remembers when the switch happened. Smugglers used to charge £18,000 to take Albanians across the channel in lorries and private cars. In June 2022 people noticed anonymous ads popping up in their TikTok feeds, which offered to ferry people on a small boat for as little as £4,000.
From top to bottom A young woman puts on roller skates. The Kukes region is one of the poorest in Europe. Adelie Molla looks at a photo of her brother, who is in London, on Instagram. A pair of women sit at home in Kukes
Some experts attribute the lower prices to a shift in Britain’s cannabis production. The drug is grown under lamps in abandoned houses and offices across the country. Before the pandemic Vietnamese gangs controlled much of the business, but by 2020 the Albanian mafia moved in. Demand was surging, and the Albanians needed more labourers to water and treat the plants. TikTok became a recruitment tool. Videos urged people to make the crossing before it was too late, creating a sense of urgency by referring to increasingly harsh immigration policies. There were even “Black Friday” deals on boat trips.
Cannabis-farm labourers are offered £600-800 a month, though many end up working for nothing because the same gangs are thought to control both cannabis production and the smuggling routes, and migrants are told they owe these groups money for bringing them to Britain. Conditions on the farms are grim. Workers are sometimes locked in derelict buildings with boarded-up windows for months on end. When a fire tore through a cannabis-production facility near Birmingham in 2020, a 43-year-old Albanian died because he couldn’t open the door. Gangs tell the labourers that they will harm their family in Albania if they try to escape.
This version of life in Britain tends not to make it on to social media. Campaigners against human trafficking suspect that gang leaders order cannabis-farm labourers to post positive stories about life in Britain. Some, however, do it voluntarily, because they want to show people back home that they’ve succeeded. In Kukes I met a 19-year-old girl whose friend is working on a British cannabis farm. In private messages he tells her how difficult his life is, but on TikTok he posts the standard aspirational content: piles of British banknotes, London landmarks and fast cars.
It’s as if a parallel world exists alongside day-to-day life in north-eastern Albania. “My heart, my mind is in England,” said Albiona Thaci
The British government says that its new immigration act will help put an end to cross-channel smuggling. The law, which has been condemned by the UN, gives the government the power to deport anyone who arrives illegally – even if they are victims of trafficking or modern slavery. Britain has also worked directly with Albania to speed up returns of its nationals. How much these measures actually deter people remains to be seen.
TikTok has responded to the surge in Albanian people-smugglers advertising on its site, introducing an automated tool that scans new posts for relevant terms and then refers those it finds to moderators. But gangs seem to populate the site with ads faster than TikTok can remove them. Some are written with what look like deliberate typos, presumably aimed at evading TikTok’s controls. In recent weeks there have been fewer ads for small boat passages and more for places in trucks. The gangs have also found a new product to push: speedboat crossings from Belgium to Kent, costing about £10,000.
Kukes’s low-rise concrete apartment blocks, punctuated with the odd minaret, are clustered on the edge of a piercing-blue lake. Beneath its placid surface lies the old city of Kukes, which was submerged when the lake was created in 1978 to power a hydro-electric dam. In the past few years the area’s Soviet-style architecture has been interspersed with brand-new houses, many of them unoccupied. Residents say they are built by people who live abroad and want to flaunt their new prosperity at home. For some at least, moving pays.
From top to bottom Rifat Demalija, one of the founders of the Centre for Youth Progress, a non-profit which supports young people in the region. A group of women in Kukes watch a video of their relatives dancing at a wedding in London. Kukes was constructed in 1978, after the original city was submerged by an artificial lake
Signs of the region’s connections with Britain are everywhere. One town boasts a replica red telephone box outside its British-themed bar. It’s as if a parallel world exists alongside day-to-day life in north-eastern Albania. “My heart, my mind is in England,” said Albiona Thaci, a 33-year-old woman whose husband was smuggled to Britain a few months previously in a small boat. She remembers a terrible few days during his crossing when she couldn’t reach him: his phone had fallen into the sea.
All the men in her apartment block have gone. Their wives and girlfriends have turned the building into a kind of communal space, drifting in and out of each other’s homes without knocking. Thaci hopes that she and her daughters will be able to settle in Britain legally. It is very hard for Albanians to win the right to settle and work in Britain – but they can get visas allowing them to stay there for up to 180 days at a time (the government granted two-thirds of the 30,000-odd applications it received for them last year). People I spoke to said they were intimidated by the visitor visa process. In Kukes, I met an “agent” offering to help people navigate it for a mere £25,000, which he said could be paid back – with interest – once people had got to Britain.
“After five years, no one will be here at all anymore. They’ll all be in London”
In a village a little farther up the mountain from Kukes, I visited a house where six women lived together in two adjacent buildings. When I stopped by, five of them were transfixed by a YouTube video that showed dozens of men from the village performing a traditional Albanian dance at a wedding in London. I met the sixth member of the group, Adelie Molla, 22, by the well near the village mosque where she was collecting water. She smiled at her housemates’ enthusiasm for “the dance of the men”. “This village is emptying out,” she said. “There are just old people here. Maybe after five years, no one will be here at all anymore. They’ll all be in London.”
This year Besmir Billa tried something new to try to keep his nephews in Kukes: he set up a TikTok account of his own. His feed captures the region’s natural beauty: clips of his friends walking through velvety-green mountains, picking flowers and stroking wild horses. “The idea I had is to express something valuable. Not something silly. I think this is something people actually need,” said Billa.
In March Albania had its national spring festival, where people take a day off to party in the streets. Billa posted a video on his TikTok account showing young people in Kukes handing flowers to old people. At first, his nephews were “not impressed”. But then the older boy clocked the viewing numbers on the spring festival video. Forty thousand and counting. For now, Billa has his nephews’ attention.■
Isobel Cockerell is a senior reporter at Coda Story
Additional reporting by Camilla Bell-Davies
PHOTOGRAPHS :
LOUIZA VRADI
