Biometric ID cards will leadto segregation

FOR the past 25 years, with each new accession to the EU, sections of the west European media have gone into xenophobic overdrive about being ‘invaded by hordes’ of migrant workers.

Seldom do the same media mention that there are eight million British and Irish citizens living abroad, many illegally.

Nor do they mention that in resort towns in Bulgaria and elsewhere, immigrants and tourists from Britain and Ireland have driven house prices beyond the reach of the local population.

However, what is interesting from this xenophobic ranting is the reaction of Government. In Ireland, according to recent reports, the Government is going to introduce biometric identity cards for non-EU immigrants. This is both surprising and disturbing.

It is surprising because non-EU immigrants in Ireland already have identification cards, issued by the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB), and which from May this year cost €100 each.

One would imagine that this ID card should be adequate both for the Government and the immigrant in Ireland. Now it seems the GNIB card is inadequate and a new biometric ID card is necessary.

This is disturbing, as it will isolate and tag specific groups, according them a separate status at a time when integration is high on the agenda of all European societies.

Of course, this segregation is nothing new in European practice in dealing with minorities. We all know what happened to minorities in Europe in the last century. In some instances they were required to wear armbands so they could be easily identified.

Is the biometric ID card a similar instrument? What will be the situation for tourists who, like non-EU immigrants, are being invited here by the State?

I do not think Ireland should be associated with this kind of totalitarian security practice. If these ID cards are issued to non-EU immigrants, they will be kept as mementoes by the descendants of immigrants as an indication of the humiliation their forebears experienced when they came to work in Ireland.

We Irish should know something about that kind of xenophobic suspicion.

If the EU is afraid of immigrants, why does it not follow the advice of the former European commissioner Jacque Delors and invest in those places from which immigrants are coming?

Like the Irish in the past, modern immigrants follow investment. They are not invaders and there is no war.

Bobby Gilmore

Chairperson

Migrant Rights Centre

55 Parnell Square West

Dublin 1