Having given the Minister for Justice a qualified welcome at the start of his term, the time has come to begin scrutinising the work of his department on immigration and integration.
Having abolished the Office of the Minister for Integration and replaced it with an understaffed section called the Office for the Promotion of Migrant Integration, Minister Alan Shatter has vowed to speed up citizenship applications (very good news) and introduce citizenship tests and citizenship ceremonies (less good news, but for some migrants a positive step all the same).
What’s more, last week his department granted residency to 850 non-EU parents of Irish citizen children, though only after the European Court of Justice ruled last March that the non-EU parents of EU citizens must be allowed to live and work in that EU member state. Seems reasonable enough, though only when not considering the length of time it took Ireland to extend this right to migrant parents of Irish citizens whose status was changed after the 2004 Citizenship Referendum – which I maintain was a major turning point in contemporary Irish state racism.
If you remember, that referendum and the legislation that followed changed the 83-year-old jus solis citizenship entitlement, according to which all people born on the island of Ireland had a right to Irish citizenship. And their parents, according to the 1990 Fajujonu Supreme Court ruling, had a right of residency.
Changing this to jus sanguinis citizenship – according to which people born in Ireland had the right to become Irish citizens only if they had least one parent with citizenship entitlement – created a two-tier citizenship right. Citizen children born before 2005 were not entitled to have their parents in Ireland (although a large percentage were granted that right, albeit temporarily, after the State won the Citizenship Referendum). Moreover, in 2005 at least 20 Irish citizens were deported together with their non-citizen parents.
Minister Shatter’s move to implement the European Court of Justice ruling is to be commended. Not so his insistence on continuing to deport people deemed ‘failed asylum seekers’. I am totally against deportations because the threat of removal causes fear and trauma to asylum seekers in direct provision holding centres (some 5,400 as we speak). People live in limbo, many for several years, with deportation orders pending yet not carried out. Deportations are also costly. As the Minister said in the Dáil, it most recently cost the State just under €1m to deport 280 people.
Deportations require close collaboration with other EU member states and are managed by Frontex, the commercial Warsaw-based EU agency which manages co-operation between EU states on border security and immigration control. This came to public knowledge last July as 12 Congolese and eight Nigerians on board a deportation flight costing €337,800 remained in Ireland as Algeria did not give permission for the flight intending to deport them. According to the minister, “€22,000 was incurred by the department in ancillary costs relating to this flight, such as securing documentation for the returnees and sending advance parties of Garda National Immigration Bureau members to Lagos and Kinshasa to ensure that landing permits and all other requirements were obtained in advance.”
So if deportations are traumatic – particularly for children for whom Ireland has become home – and so costly, then why deport? Just as asylum seekers, despite the declining number in asylum applications, assist states in redrawing racial and national boundaries, deportations reaffirm nationhood.
According residency rights to the migrant parents of Irish citizen children is definitely good news. Another piece of good news is that a group of anti-racism activists, mostly asylum seekers and former asylum seekers and their supporters, is getting together to plan an anti-deportation campaign. I’ll keep you posted.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
