Anyone who thinks that the issue of immigration is going to disappear politically and be eclipsed by other issues such as housing, climate change and taxation is, I regret to say, mistaken. The recent local and European Parliament elections seemed to demonstrate that there was no coherent groundswell of nativism and nationalism along the lines of the Reform party in Britain.
There is nonetheless a lurking danger of violence among a small number of largely urban, alienated people who see themselves as threatened by immigration. But concern about uncontrolled immigration is not fairly described as “far right”; it is a reasonable response among reasonable people.
In truth, immigration policy is not some isolated political matter. Deep-seated confusion between asylum seeking and economic migration needs to be addressed politically. It cannot be addressed simply at national level. It must be addressed at EU level by honest interaction and debate among the member states of the union. The EU sought, and was accorded, legal competence to deal with asylum seeking. It has failed. Apart from freedom of movement rights for nationals of EU member states, control of immigration per se was left with member states. The problem is that the EU has proven entirely incompetent in distinguishing effectively between asylum seeking, where it assumed competence, and economic migration into the union, where member states remain sovereign in theory.
At the heart of the problem lies the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. Article 18 of the charter elevates to quasi-constitutional status the right to asylum as guaranteed by the Geneva Convention of 1951 and the subsequent Protocol of 1967. In Ireland, the State has become constitutionally bound by the EU treaties to abide by these convention provisions to the extent decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its dealings with people asserting asylum and international protection rights. In this we now differ from the UK which, post-Brexit, has resumed its independent rights to deal with asylum and migration rights to the extent that it chooses to do so under the convention provisions.
The asylum convention provisions were never intended to deal with economic migration of the scale and order that Europe is now experiencing. It is simply unsustainable to impose convention duties on EU member states to accord refugee or international rights of entry to anyone who presents at the borders or within the State asserting that they are entitled to asylum status. This is especially so when the entitlement extends to temporary State-provided rights of residence, welfare, legal assistance and lengthy administrative and judicial processes, including a right to work after six months.
A recent letter-writer to this paper pointed out that in May the State received 2,000 asylum applications. That is close to the “new normal” predicted by Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman of annual asylum seeking between 20,000 and 30,000. That rate of asylum seeking per capita of population, he pointed out, is the highest in the EU. It must be viewed also in the light of Minister for Justice Helen McEntee’s claim that 80 per cent of asylum seekers were travelling through or resident in the UK at some point.
It is idle to debate whether “Ireland is full” – whatever that is supposed to mean. But it is by no means idle to acknowledge the obvious, glaring truth that Ireland is in no position in the middle of a massive housing shortage to add to that crisis by accepting 25,000 homeless migrants claiming asylum every year who are legally entitled to State-provided shelter.
The awful result is the establishment in the State of tent towns that are bound to create huge problems not only for the occupants, but also for the wider community. That is another inevitable humanitarian crisis in the making. It really won’t matter whether the tents are pitched in Mount Street, the Grand Canal or Thornton Hall.
Preoccupation with what is called the “far right” is predictable. Even more predictable is the reality of tent towns in the Irish winter. Simon Harris now acknowledges that the answers lie at EU level. That’s a start. The recently agreed EU migration pact is no solution to mass migration posing as asylum seeking. We are in no position yet to implement the changes envisaged in that pact. Our problems will not be solved by the migration pact. The EU has to face the fact that the 1951 and 1967 convention provisions are helpless in the face of mass economic migration.
Our Government needs to rethink the sustainability of the present international legal asylum regime for democratic countries with high levels of domestic social protection in an era of mass economic migration. And we need our ministers at EU level to show courage in advocating fundamental change. There are many other realists in the EU on whom the light is also dawning.