Immigration Bill - Integration is key not internment

It seemed extraordinary that on being interviewed on RTÉ’s This Week programme yesterday, Tánaiste Michael McDowell was not even asked about his controversial address on Saturday suggesting asylum seekers should essentially be held in detention while awaiting a decision on their asylum applications.

He made the controversial suggestion in an address to the Law Society about the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill being introduced during this Dáil term. He said he was seriously considering the possibility of detaining asylum seekers “on arrival in the State or on later making their claims for protection”.

This would apply from the time the application was made and through any appeal process. If the application was rejected, the claimant would be promptly deported.

Whether the places where those people would be held are called prisons, detention centres, or holding areas, it smacks of a latter-day internment. Repercussions of the last time internment was tried on this island are likely to give rise to haunting memories.

Of course, the minister said the system could not apply to all claimants. It would apply to “those whose claims we think we can deal with quickly and those that on the basis of experience we think are move likely to fail”.

Who would make such summary determinations? Many people would certainly have reservations about giving such powers of selection to faceless civil servants.

Many of the asylum seekers that arrive on our shores are probably fleeing from economic deprivation rather than some form of persecution. That was the way it was with the millions of Irish people who fled to all parts of the globe in the aftermath of the Great Famine and throughout much of the last century.

The Tánaiste acknowledges that this State “has undergone a profound transformation, from a country of emigration to one of substantial immigration”. Some 10% of the population is now made up of immigrants, which represents “the most significant demographic change in Ireland since the Famine”.

“Our wealth and prosperity and economic wellbeing are built on and depend on inward migration,” Mr McDowell emphasised in his address to the Law Society. “Inward migration today, as nearly always in the past, has the potential to enrich and strengthen the Irish state.”

Rather than stressing the dynamics of integration, however, he has unfortunately put the emphasis on frustrating entry and even expelling people.

This could have most unfortunate repercussions, especially in view of our high proportion of immigrants, as well as the possible consequences for so many Irish people abroad. We should be particularly conscious of the implications of the message that such a draconian approach would send abroad, especially in view of the thousands of undocumented Irish in the United States.

Little over a year ago, the Dáil and the Seanad unanimously took the unprecedented step of passing a resolution endorsing legislation before the US Congress, that would allow undocumented immigrants already in the United States to obtain temporary working visas for six years. Those people could then become eligible for permanent visas.

The biggest challenge posed by the current wave of immigration here should be the meaningful integration of those the minister called the “new Irish”. The

Government has the responsibility to face that challenge, and it should do so with positive measures, instead of emphasising tactics that could be open to misrepresentation.