Deportations Are Common Sense

By John Spain 

THE shambles that is Ireland’s immigration policy was on view here in the last couple of weeks. But it’s hard not to have sympathy for the government. Every time it tries to take any decisive action whatsoever it is pilloried by the politically correct majority in the Irish media who would rather emote about a problem than admit it exists. 

The first large scale deportation of failed asylum seekers took place last week, and it was followed by the usual bleeding heart stuff from much of the media. The 65 deportees on the chartered flight were from Romania and Moldova and they were repatriated. 

All had been through the applications system and the subsequent appeals stage and, like the vast majority of so-called asylum seekers here, were found not to have a case. In reality they were economic migrants. 

There will be more mass deportations using charter planes in the coming months as the government here, like other European Union states, tries to make some impact on the problem. But it will be an uphill struggle. 

Two countries, Nigeria and Romania, account for half of all the asylum claims made in Ireland since 2000. Nigerians alone make up over one-third of the total, with Romanians varying between 10% and 20%. 

Unsurprisingly, the vast bulk of applications from both countries are rejected. In fact both countries have now been categorized as safe, which means that in future asylum seekers from them will be fast tracked. Last year, over 4,000 Nigerians applied; just 145 were accepted. In the case of Romania, 1,677 applied and 105 were accepted.

Of course the vast majority of people seeking asylum here do not do so when entering the country (in fact some of them are smuggled over the border from the North). Most of them get into the country first on some pretext and then turn up later at the Refugee Applications offices in Dublin. 

When they get in here many destroy any identity papers they have so that the refugee staff have no way of knowing where they are from. This makes them it harder to assess whether they have a genuine case or not. 

Of course many of them have been using the Irish baby method of getting effective residency here, although this is no longer accepted as an automatic guarantee after a Supreme Court decision ruling against that. Many of these asylum seekers now simply don’t bother applying at all. Many others drop out of the system at various stages or go underground when they have exhausted all stages of the process and failed. 

The cost of dealing with the asylum seeker problem here now is enormous, costing hundreds of millions and eating up Garda (police) and civil service time. It has also led to a crime problem – a significant number of prison inmates here now are immigrants – and it is very late in the day for us to be tackling the problem. 

The only effective way to deter bogus asylum seekers from coming here is to deport them when they fail, and to publicize the fact that we are doing so. It may not be pleasant but it is the only way. 

As I said above, it will be an uphill struggle. Last week’s deportation, in spite of the outcry, was merely scratching the surface. That sent back 65 people – but about 10,000 failed asylum seekers have been served with deportation orders in the last few years, and so far we are sending only around 500 a year back. 

Many of them who are served with deportation orders change address and vanish. In addition, there are the unknown thousands here who never apply to the asylum system in the first place. 

As if we did not have enough problems dealing with the asylum issue, it now looks like the government is about to make even more trouble for itself. Ireland is now the only EU state offering equal work and welfare rights to the citizens of the 10 new EU members, after Britain last week announced that it was to restrict access to welfare benefits. 

The fear is that welfare payments in western Europe are so generous that they will attract large numbers of migrants from the former communist countries of Eastern Europe after they become new members of the European Union on May 1. Initially, all the EU countries said they would give citizens of the new members full access but, one by one, even the big nations like Germany, France and Britain have had second thoughts and are applying restrictions for the first few years. 

Ireland is now the only country that is still saying it will give unlimited access to work and welfare benefits to the new members. This seems foolhardy to say the least – but then we were also the only nation in Europe who granted asylum seekers effective citizenship on the basis of having an Irish baby. Clearly we are too politically correct to learn any lessons. 

The most striking thing about the new members in Eastern Europe is their very low output (and therefore incomes) compared with the existing EU. The average is about 40%. In fact the total output of the ten new members will come to only 4.5% of the enlarged EU, even though they will have 20% of its population. 

What this means is that there are millions of East Europeans, especially from rural Poland and other places where living standards are almost medieval in comparison to the EU. And many of these people will want to move to the rich west in search of a better life. 

To counter this other EU governments have indicated they will maintain restrictions on immigration from the new members from two to seven years. But Ireland stands alone with the door open, even to those who could move here without any hope of a job so that they could live on welfare. 

It means, of course, that in future the bulk of our labor needs will be fulfilled from within the enlarged EU, even those jobs which currently are left to the thousands of illegals and asylum seekers in the Irish black economy. 

That means that it is now more important than ever for us to take effective action on the bogus asylum seeker problem here instead of piously doing nothing as we have been for years. So there will be a lot more deportation flights from Ireland in the coming year, whether we like it or not. 

It may not fit with our Ireland of the Welcomes image. But it’s time we were mature enough to deal honestly with the migration problem we now face as one of the rich countries of Europe (even if we still can’t provide our own people with a proper free health service and decent school buildings). 

If anyone has a better solution, I have yet to hear it.