Asylum-seeker work permits cost employers £25 a month

Employers offering jobs to asylum-seekers will have to pay £25 a month or £125 a year for work permits, following the Cabinet decision to allow qualifying asylum-seekers to work here.

Refugee agencies and the Sports Against Racism organisation have expressed concern about the cost, saying it will make it almost impossible for asylum-seekers to get jobs.

The Irish Refugee Council said the cost and the bureaucracy surrounding the scheme "will most certainly act as a deterrent to potential employers, who will be less likely to tackle the red tape around this overly restrictive scheme".

A spokesman for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, which issues work permits, said the scheme would give asylum-seekers the same rights as EU and Irish nationals. The Department had always charged a fee for work permits, partly as an administrative charge, and it was the same charge for all work permits. The fee is £25 a month for the first four months and £125 from five months up to a year.

He said the fee established a link between the person and the employer. It showed a measure of commitment by the employer to the employee and would help protect against casualisation.

"We are talking about real jobs for real people and we don't want casualisation," the spokesman said.

He added that the scheme had only just started. "We have no complaints so far and no queries from asylum-seekers about the permits. We have processed applications and issued some permits. It's early days yet and we don't know the pattern with asylum-seekers, whether they will have a high, medium or low level of skills."

Mr Frank Buckley of Sports Against Racism, who contacted The Irish Times about the cost of the permits, said it would put employers off taking on asylum-seekers.

"If I want somebody to clean dishes, I'm not going to go off and pay £25 a month when I can get someone who doesn't need a permit. It might be OK for somebody with serious qualifications like a radiologist or whatever, but for the ordinary Joe Soap, he doesn't have a hope."

The Department spokesman said, however, that it was in areas such as catering that employers could not fill jobs.

A spokesman for the Irish Refugee Council said that while it welcomed the move to extend the right to work to asylum-seekers, the specifics were causing concern.

The spokesman pointed out that in addition to getting the employer to pay for a permit, an asylum-seeker had to locate a potential employer in the first place.

Then, once the application was submitted, they had to wait for three to five weeks, not allowed to work, until the permit was granted. The employer then had to prove they had made efforts to recruit Irish or European Economic Area (EU, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein) nationals, either through advertising or the Internet.