Sir - Expectations that over 300,000 immigrants will arrive in Ireland in the next six years, to play a vital role in implementing the National Development Plan, appear to have generated little controversy. This is sharp contrast to the hysteria which has driven Government policy on asylum-seekers.
The Minister of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has emphasised how our current economic boom has made Ireland a target for asylum seekers. A fixation on so-called "pull factors" served to justify punitive welfare and employment restrictions on asylum-seekers and to justify their exclusion from State funded employment and language training. Somehow the arrival of asylum-seekers has become regarded as a crisis while hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers are seen as no problem at all.
Many asylum-seekers, currently prevented from working, possess the very skills which are being sought from overseas. Yet it is Government policy to consign them to long-term unemployment. This benefits nobody. Some joined-up thinking between immigration policies driven by the needs of the economy and policies driven by a desire to exclude asylum-seekers from the economy is urgently needed. - A report published last September by the Irish Refugee Council- " Asylum Seekers and the Right to Work in Ireland" - argued that asylum-seekers are part of a growing minority which is at risk of becoming generationally excluded unless comprehensive action is taken to ensure that barriers to participation in Irish society are removed. The report argued that, at the very least, asylum-seekers should be allowed to work after six months (as in the United Kingdom). It also argued that asylum-seekers should be allowed to apply for work permits according to the same criteria as people from non-EU countries in areas where such persons are being recruited to fill vacancies in Ireland. This need not interfere with their applications for asylum.
Dr Bryan Fanning, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, UCD, Dublin 4.