The spectre of ‘remigration’ is haunting Europe. Slovenia in 1992 gives us a blueprint for this state terror | Miha Mazzini

In February that year, the Slovenian government officially deleted 25,000 citizens, turning them overnight into illegal immigrants

So much of your daily life – your job, your health, your home – hinges on the fact that your name is in a government database. Are you a legal citizen of your country, with everything that entails? You are, until an anonymous bureaucrat hits a key one night and strips it all away, turning you into an illegal immigrant. It happened in Slovenia in 1992.

“I took my son to register for secondary school. The clerk rifled through the papers, then stared at me as if refusing to see the boy standing right next to me. Finally, she said: ‘But you don’t have a son. He doesn’t exist.’” I can’t forget the look on the face of the woman who was telling me this story. It was a mixture of deep hurt and bewilderment, with a pause after every sentence, as if she were walking through a minefield. During the research for my book Erased, I compiled countless stories like this: stories I once would have thought impossible.

Miha Mazzini is a writer, film-maker and anthropologist