Four Catholic bishops yesterday issued this statement, calling for the regularisation, on humanitarian grounds, of the situation of two groups of asylum seekers in Ireland, comprising an estimated 15,000 people.
The Bishops are: Bishop Laurence Ryan, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin and President of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace; Bishop John Kirby, Bishop of Clonfert and Chairperson of Trocaire; Bishop Jim Moriarty, Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin and President of the Council for Social Welfare; and Bishop Fiachra O Ceallaigh OFM, Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin and Chairperson of the Irish Bishops' Refugee Project, in the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace. The four comprise the Bishops' Committee on Asylum Seekers and Refugees.
Full text of statement
Introduction
This statement is issued to draw attention to a developing humanitarian issue concerning asylum-seekers in Ireland. For the Christian, each refugee is an individual human being, with his or her own dignity and personal history, with his or her own culture, experiences and legitimate expectations (Pope John Paul II, Bangkok, May 11th 1984).
The internationally accepted right of asylum has been established for half a century under the Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951. Ireland is a party to this Convention. Therefore anyone coming to this country and requesting asylum has the right to be admitted and to reside here legally while his or her application is considered by the State. This right must continue to be scrupulously safeguarded.
In law each application for asylum must be individually considered. This means that all asylum applications must continue to be scrutinised in the light of internationally established criteria and each case determined fairly and objectively. However, even if the necessary procedural safeguards are duly observed, and the procedures for dealing with applications are fair, reasonable and based on accurate and adequate information about the countries from which applicants come, many applications, in all likelihood a large majority, will be rejected.
Such rejection usually implies the eventual deportation of the unsuccessful applicant. However unpalatable, the possibility of deportation is an unavoidable part of the determination procedure. Unsuccessful applicants are consequently liable to be requested to leave the country voluntarily, or be subject to deportation.
A particular humanitarian issue now exists in Ireland and calls for humane consideration. It arises because, firstly, there is a considerable backlog of unprocessed applications for asylum, and secondly, there is a sizeable category of asylum-seekers whose applications have been turned down but who have not been asked to leave the country. Both groups are legally living here.
Backlog of Unprocessed Applications
A large backlog of unprocessed cases has now built up due to the inability of the Irish asylum processing machinery to keep pace with the unanticipated increase in asylum applications since 1996 or thereabouts. As is generally known, up to that point the number of asylum-seekers arriving in Ireland was exceptionally low in European terms. Around that time it began to rise sharply and increased to a totally unforeseen level in a comparatively short time. The administrative structures to process asylum applications were greatly overburdened and unable to keep up with the increased flow. The result is that by the end of March 2000 the total number of unprocessed applications exceeded 11,400.
It is difficult to fault the Government for not foreseeing the extent to which the flow of asylum-seekers would increase in such a short period. Very considerable efforts have been made to provide the substantial additional resources required to expand administrative provision, and to devise and put in place appropriate policies, all in a relatively short time. In recent months the Government has sanctioned increases in personnel and other resources to process asylum applications, and approved a series of policy and service-provision measures related to asylum-seekers and refugees.
Even with these additional resources, it appears likely that the processing backlog will still continue to increase. Official sources estimate that there will be upwards of 12,000 new asylum applications in the course of this year, or an average of 1,000 a month. In the first quarter of 2000, the number of applications being processed averaged only about 440 a month. As the additional personnel allocated to processing come on stream, the processing rate is expected to rise to a monthly average of 700 from May 2000 onwards. Such a rate would still be significantly lower than necessary to process the expected inflow of upwards of 1,000 a month, and so the backlog will continue to increase, by perhaps 300 a month.
These figures suggest that further substantial resources need to be allocated even to prevent the backlog of applications from continuing to rise. What, however, is to happen to the backlog of 11,400 already existing at the end of March 2000? To deploy resources away from dealing with new applications in order to deal instead with this backlog would simply lead to the emergence of a new, rolling, backlog.
Rejected Applications
Besides the 11,400 people whose applications remain unprocessed, there is a further category of 4,000 whose applications for asylum have been considered and rejected but who have not yet been requested to leave the country. Those in this category are still legally entitled to remain in the State until all due formalities have been observed in regard to their expulsion. Some have been here since 1994 or 1995.
This figure of 4,000 does not include those who have been granted temporary leave to remain as parents of an Irish-born child, those whose applications have been deemed abandoned and those who between August 1999 and March 2000 inclusive have received the so-called 14-day letter. (This is a formal notification to the recipient that the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform proposes to make a deportation order in his or her regard, and that the recipient may make representations to the Minister within 14 days of the sending of the letter. Few answers to these 14-day letters have been received. Some 300 deportation orders were subsequently served on recipients of the 14-day letter. It is understood that some 200 of the 950 letters sent were returned because the addressee was no longer at the given address. Only 108 people were actually deported between the beginning of 1994 and the end of March 2000. It is possible that some more may have left the country voluntarily.)
Total Numbers Involved
The two groups described above comprise an estimated 15,400 people who, though legally residing in the State, suffer from growing uncertainty about their future. The 11,400 whose applications have not yet been processed have no indication as to when their case will be heard. On present trends, it can be estimated that seven out of eight of these applications will be rejected at some future date. For the 4,000 whose applications have already been rejected, there is no indication from official sources as to what is proposed in their regard.
The figure of 15,400 given above cannot of its nature be exact; it is no more than an estimate. Some people in both groups covered by the estimates are likely to have left the country already. In any event, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform figures, on which the estimates are based, are higher than the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs figures for asylum-seekers receiving social welfare payments (March 31st 2000).
A Christian Response
For Christian, humanitarian and pragmatic reasons there is a strong case for regularising the situation of the two groups in question. Under international law they were legally entitled to come to Ireland and to apply for asylum. It was not their fault that for a period the system dealing with applications was unable to cope, with the consequence that their applications still remain unprocessed, or that, mainly for legal reasons, only a small number of those whose cases were rejected have been served with deportation orders.
Of the 15,400 asylum seekers referred to, some have now been residing in Ireland for up to six years and many more for upwards of three years. For example, among the 11,400 applications unprocessed up to the end of March 2000 were a handful outstanding since 1996, over 500 since 1997, and 1,750 since 1998. As already noted, many have been living in Ireland for several years. They have put down roots; some have children who have spent most of their childhood in Ireland and attend school here; some have been allowed to work; many have become fluent in English. From a humanitarian perspective, the fact that they have been here for so long has begun to create its own reality.
The more time passes without clarifying the situation of these two groups, the more difficult it becomes morally to justify eventual expulsion. It is one thing to expel someone after an expeditious asylum process; it is another to envisage the deportation of those who have been living here for several years. As was already pointed out in December 1999 concerning those who had been refused refugee status and so left with the threat but not the certainty of deportation:
"The existing situation . . . is a deepening administrative nightmare. The longer it is left unresolved, the more morally questionable will any eventual mass deportations be." (Dispersal of Asylum Seekers: Submission to the Asylum Directorate from the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, 13 December 1999).
The current situation creates considerable uncertainty, anxiety and stress, all of which exact a growing human cost. The resultant insecurity eating away at those in this situation must be addressed and resolved in a humane and Christian way. In practical terms, this can be done by regularising their position on a once-off basis.
Regularisation
Regularisation could be effected in any of three ways:
a. by granting refugee status on a bloc basis to all who applied for asylum by a given date;
b. by giving asylum-seekers who applied for asylum by a certain date the alternative of applying for immigrant worker status for a stated period;
c. by granting humanitarian leave to remain in the country.
The granting of refugee status means that the asylum-seeker is given the right to live and work in the country, and to enjoy most rights to which a citizen is entitled, other than the right to vote. Immigrant worker status confers the right to work in the State for a specified period, at the end of which, unless the status is extended, the immigrant must leave the country.
Humanitarian leave to remain may be granted at the discretion of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, in cases where application for refugee status has been turned down. It carries fewer rights than refugee status. Only 208 asylum seekers have been granted such status in Ireland between 1994 and the end of March 2000. This contrasts with the approach of some other European countries, which even if they grant refugee status to proportionately no more asylum applicants than Ireland does, certainly grant humanitarian leave to remain on a much greater scale. While Ireland grants refugee status to about 13 per cent of applicants, Denmark, a country of similar population, has a refugee recognition rate of 14.8 per cent (1998 figures) but a total recognition rate (i.e. those given refugee status plus those granted humanitarian leave to remain) of 58 per cent. Belgium has a total recognition rate of 25 per cent and Switzerland a refugee recognition rate of 8.3 per cent but a total recognition rate of 19 per cent.
Only the Government has the detailed knowledge needed to decide what combination of the three possible options outlined above would be a suitable policy choice. The purpose of our statement is primarily to draw attention to the developing humanitarian issue in relation to the asylum-seekers in the two groups described, and to the increasingly urgent need for a considered and humane response to their situation.
It might be noted that the size of the group which might benefit from regularisation is small in relation to projected flows of economic immigrants which would be required to satisfy our labour needs over the next few years. The current exceptional economic prosperity has seen our unemployment rate drop to little over 5 per cent, with every likelihood of falling further. Recent news reports speak of 70,000 unfilled job vacancies.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that employers are resorting to increasingly desperate stratagems to find workers. One forecast has suggested that an inflow of some 160,000 immigrant workers will be needed over the next six or seven years, an average of, say, 25,000 annually, to meet our labour needs. The media have reported that the Tanaiste, Mary Harney TD, envisages a flow of 200,000 workers into the Irish economy over the next few years. While some of these will consist of returning Irish emigrants, and others will be EU citizens who are entitled to enter and work freely in Ireland, a sizeable proportion is likely to come from non-EU countries.
To eventually deport through one door a group of asylum-seekers who might have resided legally in Ireland for several years, while admitting perhaps 10 times as many immigrant workers through another door, would seem hard to defend, either in moral or practical terms.
At this juncture in our national social and economic development we have, as always, a choice. We can choose to turn more inwards on ourselves, or we can choose to create a more welcoming, inclusive society, prepared to share some of its increasing wealth and opportunities with others, just as in the past other countries were prepared to give a place to Irish people fleeing persecution or poverty in their own country. The choice should be in favour of inclusiveness, for all the marginalised and vulnerable who live here, whether citizens or non-citizens. Our response to asylum-seekers is one of the ways in which we are defining our sense of community and the values we wish to permeate it. It is appropriate to close with the age-old religious teaching drawn from the experience of a whole people, the Israelites: "If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must count him as one of your own countrymen and love him as yourselves, for you were once strangers yourselves in Egypt." (Lev 19.33)