I am sure you remember the campaign to regularise the residency rights of the migrant parents of Irish citizen children – 18,000 of whom were allowed to re-apply for residency to keep ‘care and company’ to their citizen children. This was after almost two years of refusal by the former Minister for Justice and in the wake of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, after the process had been abolished in the wake of the 2003 Lobe and Osayande Supreme Court ruling.
This successful campaign – initiated by AkiDwA, the African Women’s Network – was run by the Coalition Against Deportations of Irish Children (Cadic), a group that I had the honour to chair for the first two years.
Looking Forward, Looking Back: Experiences of Irish Citizen Child Families, a recent report commissioned by Cadic, reminds us that even though the majority of the nearly 17,000 parents granted residency by the so-called ‘Irish Born Child’ (IBC/05) scheme are happy with their lives in Ireland, they continue to constitute a separate category of migrants deprived of full participation in Irish civic life. Moreover, the formal declaration that prohibits family reunification continues to cause these parents much trauma and disquiet.
Cadic, which is funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies, provided information and support to this group of migrants. Had Cadic not existed, it is hard to estimate how many of these parents would have felt empowered to successfully apply. However, the report emphasises the ongoing need to review status and the lack of certainty around future residency rights, which creates a sense of insecurity and lack of control.
People interviewed for this report spoke of their experiences of racism and of feeling afraid, stressed and demotivated. Interviewees told of difficulties in relation to housing and employment, yet none were as acute as the pain caused by family separation.
While applicants have the right to individually apply to have their family reunification cases reviewed, in practice the scheme works to divide families, not unite them. Family separation affects children and adults alike, and the parents interviewed expressed frustration in terms of having to live as single parents not by choice, and without the family support they had enjoyed in their original countries.
Separation from other children is particularly traumatic, and in such cases – despite expressing satisfaction at the success of their applications – interviewees often questioned their decision to settle in Ireland with so much pain and insecurity hanging over them.
The report is a timely reminder of Ireland’s piecemeal immigration policy. While offering some general recommendations in relation to equality measures, particularly access to public spaces and services, some specific recommendations relate to the need to regulate private landlords and housing policies, childcare, retraining and education (these migrant parents are prevented from access to third level education) and specific information for this vulnerable group.
However, instead of simply listing these recommendations under the ‘intercultural’ or ‘integration’ rubrics, the report could have been more explicit in reminding us that here is one group of migrants, singled out by a State which remains intent on categorising mig-rants into those more deser-ving (es-sential to the State’s economy) and those less deserving – asylum seekers and migrant parents of Irish citizen children, whose basic individual and family rights are not honoured.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eireann
