Mo stares at his coffee and his yellow, tobacco-stained fingers pick at the sandwich on his plate. Mo - for Mohammed - is nervous and a little hesitant as he begins to talk about his early life in Turkey and the dreadful journey that brought him to Britain two years ago.
He lives in one room in a bed-and-breakfast hostel in London. Under current British legislation he is entitled only to the most basic assistance from the local council. He survives on food parcels and on the occasional visit to a drop-in centre set up by the Refugee Council in Vauxhall. This provides him with a hot meal and advice from case workers on his endless wait for asylum status.
What unsettles him most is the fear that the Immigration and Nationality Department will turn down his application and he will be deported or, worse, forced to return to Turkey.
"I am Kurdish. Until recently it was forbidden under Turkish law to speak our language in the street. To say that you were Kurdish was a crime and many of my friends and family suffered for this," he says.
Mo's journey through Europe to seek asylum in Britain was made at the suggestion of his family. His job as a waiter was extremely low-paid and he believed he was facing certain imprisonment under Turkey's anti-terrorism laws because of his sympathy with the Kurdish independence movement, spearheaded by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party).
His journey took many weeks and on several occasions he was mugged and lost most of the money he had brought with him. But when he eventually arrived in Britain on a ferry from France he felt, at last, that he had a chance to make a new life.
His mistake was that he did not apply for asylum at the port of entry. If he had, he would have been entitled to social welfare benefits and a local housing authority might even have provided him with a flat or a bedsit while the application was processed.
"Now I am just waiting. I do not know what I will do if I have to return to Turkey. There are many Kurds living in Britain and I feel safe here and I want to work and start a new life."
Mo is certainly not alone in waiting for a decision on his asylum application. The latest figures show there is a backlog of 76,000 such asylum-seekers. Nearly 10,000 of these have been waiting since 1992 to learn their fate.
The Immigration Minister, Mr Mike O'Brien, recently told the Commons Home Affairs Committee that the asylum system had been reduced to a "complete shambles" by the backlog of 76,000 cases, which includes up to 25,000 people awaiting the outcome of an appeal. He also described the programme of emergency food and temporary housing by local councils, such as the one looking after Mo, as "a shambles within a shambles" that the government could not sustain.
But the asylum problem goes much deeper than that. There is speculation that more than 110,000 asylum-seekers could be expelled over the next four years if the system is not completely overhauled.
The government is expected to publish its plans to reform the system in July, but in the meantime, the immigration service says, the number of illegal entrants has risen sharply since the beginning of the year.
It may be due to better detection techniques at the ports and airports around the country - they are now estimated to be picking up 50 per cent of illegal entrants compared with 20 per cent last year. But the Home Office does not know the exact number of illegal entrants or where many of them are living.
According to Mr O'Brien, the latest figures tell a somewhat misleading story. In 1997, 14,150 people were traced and served with illegal entry papers, "but many of them may have entered in previous years." The Tories point out that 25,000 people have applied for asylum in Britain in the last 10 years, 10,700 have been granted asylum and 13,000 were deported. But what about the other 2,000 people, they ask.
Labour's "firm but fair" policy on immigration reflects a willingness to get tough with ineligible asylum-seekers. But it also appears to be preparing to grant a once-off amnesty to 10,000 people on the lists. Mo hopes he will be one of the lucky ones.