The problems of immigration into Ireland will have to be solved within the context of developing European policies to deal with immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, a conference in Dublin has been told.
"Irish people are likely to experience many of the same anxieties about immigration and multi-ethnicity, and to show the same hostility towards immigrants, as do the people of other European countries," said Prof John Rex of the University of Warwick. He was opening a conference on "The Expanding Nation: towards a multi-ethnic Ireland" in Trinity College Dublin last night.
He said that so far Europe had seen three different responses to dealing with immigrants, depending on the history and political culture of the individual country. In France, for example, the response was to seek to assimilate the immigrant, emphasising the equal rights of all individual citizens, and making citizenship relatively easy for immigrants to obtain. This approach discourages separate organisations and cultures among immigrant minorities.
In countries like Germany "guest-workers" were not accorded citizenship, though they received certain social rights. In countries like England there was recognition for the separate culture of immigrants, without seeing this as an obstacle to their becoming citizens - the multi-cultural approach.
However, Prof Rex pointed out that since the 1970s economic migration had been effectively stopped. Since then the principal group of incomers had been political migrants.
"Governments have to justify their acceptance of refugees and other political immigrants on quite different grounds [than] economic migrants," he said. "What they have to do is fulfil their obligations under the Geneva Convention, but such obligations are not necessarily recognised by their electorates, and their governments have usually done little to persuade them."
He said that, instead of finding ways to implementing the Convention, governments had been adopting policies which would make it unnecessary to attempt to integrate these groups. These included attacking those who facilitated the migration, and the creation of "safe havens" where victims of genocide and war should be afforded some degree of protection and would therefore have no political excuse for migration.
Gypsies posed a special problem in Europe, he said. Like the Jews, they were regarded with fear and hostility, and were subject to the murderous persecution of the Holocaust.
While some governments, like the British, had attempted to develop policies which allowed some place for gypsies and travellers, others, like the Czech and Slovak governments, had either persecuted gypsies or ignored them. The whole problem of immigrant settlement must include central consideration of the gypsy question at both national and European level.
The conference, which continues today and tomorrow, is organised by the Department of Sociology at TCD, in association with the Refugee Agency, and is sponsored by The Irish Times, The Baha'i Community of Ireland and the Refugee Language and Training Project.