ImmigrationShortly after making a speech about children's rights in December 2001, the then Minister for Children, Mary Hanafin, was asked about the problem of poverty among the children of asylum seekers. She replied that she was not the Minister for those children - they were, she said, the responsibility of the Minister for Justice.
She was right, strictly speaking, but did this not imply that the children of asylum seekers were exempt from children's rights? And why, asks Bryan Fanning, does this matter?
For one, it's a useful reminder of how we have come to take as given the idea of stratified rights. Using citizenship as the legal perimeter fence, "nationals" on one side and "non-Irish nationals" on the other, it seems entirely natural to give one category of people lesser welfare entitlements or to exclude them from the remit of anti-poverty policies. An asylum-seeker can be a child but not a child, for no reason but that a bureaucratic category says so. And rules are rules.
Fanning, senior lecturer at the school of applied social science at UCD and editor of a rich new volume on immigration, invites us to question this administrative logic. It has taken hold, in Ireland as elsewhere, as part of a wider unravelling of post-second World War human rights norms - so much so that "the Irish response to immigration has been to extend differences between the rights of citizens and those of non-citizens".
So fluid and fast-moving are the changes being wrought here by immigration that writing about it can feel like photographing a moving train at night, the result a streaky blur that, however elegant at first glance, will be of no use to anyone in the morning. Fanning's solution is to draw together contributors from a variety of fields - political science, economics, sociology, psychology, linguistics and others - and to opt for a mosaic over a single, perhaps still unattainable, overview.
It's a good call, and what is lost in consistency of tone is recouped in other ways. In particular, Fanning's observation on the ideological roots of an immigration policy driven by notions of citizenship lays the ground for the book's major achievement: showing how the assumptions that inform our thinking about immigration have real and deeply-felt effects on the daily lives of those who settle here. This thought-and-effect dualism becomes a thematic thread.
ABEL UGBA, IN a chapter on African Pentecostals in Ireland, notes that for many adherents these churches are places of refuge from "the problems, hostilities and rejection they face in the larger society", and sees in the themes of their songs, prayers and sermons a desire to prosper, to overcome the difficulties of settling in a strange land. A chapter on "Getting into Politics" recounts in every sorry detail the saga of an attempt by the Africa Solidarity Centre in 2003 to survey the main political parties on their inclusion of ethnic minorities. Most were unhelpful, others dismissive. "Senior officials from a number of parties remarked in telephone conversations that they had never given the issue of immigrant participation in politics any thought," the authors recall.
Two further contributions - one a study of the psychological stress of forced migration that draws on powerful personal testimony, the other a reflection on the experiences of Nigerian lone mothers in Ireland - add to the reader's impression that for all the narcissistic high-fivery (New spices! Colourful clothes! No riots!) the story of Ireland's opening-up is one that, for many, is experienced essentially as one of exclusion.
But that is not to say that optimists will find nothing here to reassure them. A rigorous piece of economic fine-combing by Alan Barrett and Adele Bergin shows how immigration makes the host country richer, as well as the migrant. They estimate that net immigration added between 2.3 per cent and 3 per cent to GNP between 2003 and 2005. And as Neltah Chadamoyo, Bryan Fanning and Fidèle Mutwarasibo point out, overtly anti-immigrant politics have so far met with little success, surely an indication that something is being done right.
By mapping the directions of current research, this collaboration also suggests some avenues for future work. For instance, it is striking how one of the groups most pivotal to the success of integration - the Irish-born population - is frequently absent from public discussions about immigration. Little research has been done on how communities have responded to the arrival of large immigrant contingents, or on the causes of hostility and resentment where they arise.
If the authors are broadly critical of the State's approach to immigration, they generally have difficulty in identifying an integration policy at all. As Piaras Mac Einrí advises, a little less self-congratulation and more long-term thinking might be a start. And perhaps, suggests Maja Halilovic- Pastuovic, we would do well to learn from the experience of the relatively long-established group of Bosnian refugees in Ireland. Almost a decade and a half after their arrival, she argues, their integration has yet to happen.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic was the winner of the 2007 Irish Times Douglas Gageby Fellowship
Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland Edited by Bryan Fanning, Manchester University Press, 262pp. €22
