Councils must ensure ‘immigrants know about voting rights’

Local authorities need to be “actively ensuring” that migrant populations within their jurisdictions are aware of the political system and their voting rights, a new report from the Immigrant Council of Ireland says.

It said despite the fact that any legally resident migrant over the age of 18 can vote in local elections where they live, “this is often not occurring”, and lack of registration and awareness of rights is “part of the problem”.

The Immigrant Council of Ireland created a survey for local authorities to gather knowledge about the extent to which they engage with the process of migrant integration. It was sent to all 31 local authorities, of which 25 responded in full or in part, representing an 80.6 per cent completion rate.

The report, published on Tuesday, says that overall local authorities had made some progress in developing policies and practices to support and enhance migrant integration, but “there is considerable room for improvement”.

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It said the areas in which most progress has been achieved are tackling racism, voting and local migrant integration strategies.

In contrast, areas such as integration within local authority staffing and the corporate structures of local authorities are concerning in their lack of progress.

“Based on the data that is available, this suggests that while local authorities are progressing integration of migrant communities in their programming and external services, they are not making progress on areas to do with their internal structures, staffing, funding allocation and diversity,” it said.

The report says there is no national commitment to, or framework for, evaluating the progress of local migrant integration strategies.

Only four local authorities had formally evaluated their previous migrant integration strategy, while two of those provided details of the formal evaluation.

Data collection

The survey also assessed the quality and extent of data collection by local authorities in relation to migrant integration.

No local authority scored more than 52 per cent in the survey responses on data collection, while the average score across all councils was 23 per cent.

“This shows that there is a big challenge for local authorities in data collection across the board,” it said.

“It is not clear whether in general data is not being collected, or if the data is not able to be disaggregated on issues relating to the migrant community.”

The Immigrant Council of Ireland also said it was “not possible” to assess whether proactive outreach and support measures were being undertaken to increase the number of persons from an immigrant background working at all levels as data was not being kept in “many local authorities”.

“However, even within the local authorities that are collecting data on the levels of staff from a migrant background, very few of them are meeting the goal of 1 per cent of staff being from an ethnic minority background stated in the [Migrant Integration] Strategy,” the report said.

“This 1 per cent already falls short of the reality of Irish society, and our workplaces should reflect this reality.”

The council said “as a matter of urgency” local authorities need to ensure that they are collecting this data as well as further strategies to reduce the barriers for people from a migrant/ethnic minority background face when applying for and being offered local authority jobs.